Fictive Family

I just watched a sweet film starting the marvelous Joan Plowright entitled Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont. It is about an elderly woman who moves to London where her grandson also lives. She encounters a young man, a writer, and they become friends. The other residents think he is her grandson and since her own grandson never visits she allows the misunderstanding to continue. It is really about the way in which fictive family, that is family that is established by the participants rather than by birth, adoption, or marriage, can be much more profound than the family we have from circumstance. As someone with a large fictive family I quite delighted in the film.