When Nell Argall meets Eve Bowman during their first year of high school in 2006, it’s love at first sight. Crass and bold, Eve is everything Nell wants to be. But, Nell tells herself, she isn’t gay. She loves Eve more like a sister. Like a best friend. Eve is gay, although she hasn’t yet admitted this to herself. Eve loves Nell like family and also something more; Nell is Eve’s safe place, the person who makes her brave enough to face down the bullying that begins the second the popular girls get a whiff of her queerness. Madeleine Gray, in her vibrant, compelling second novel – which was picked up by Oprah in a Sydney bookshop this week – captures this particular aspect of girlhood perfectly when she writes: “There is something almost sublime about the cruelty of preteen girls; the absolute acid of it.”
In 2024, Eve’s life is marked by Nell’s absence. She raises their daughter, Lake, as a single parent, and sees so much of Nell in her. Like Nell, Lake is quick-witted and sharp-tongued. Eve treats her child more like a peer, which puts her on the outs with teachers and other parents. Having been victimised for her queerness during adolescence, adult Eve embraces it as a shield to the point where even other queer parents are intimidated by her; one of them reflects that every time he’s tried to break through her prickly exterior, Eve has “closed up like a pair of twenty-year-old thighs in Advanced Pilates”.
The novel’s dual timeline is punctuated by two betrayals: as an adolescent, Nell wounds Eve in the way that only a best friend can, snatching her love away cruelly and abruptly; in adulthood, after the two have reconnected and made the decision to forge an unconventional family together, Eve repays the hurt with a betrayal that breaks their family apart.
The narrative coalesces around each betrayal with urgency, although Gray controls the pace by shifting easily between the past and present, taking the reader from the reassuring safety of their friendship to the ache of its absence. Chosen Family exposes the desperate bids we make for the attention of those we love and the ways we try to cling to power in relationships where we fear we might lose ourselves.
The first time she is estranged from Nell, Eve finds herself and her queer family at uni. Like so many of us, she experiences a rush of relief as she throws herself into an environment where she finally feels she belongs. There’s a bit of wish-fulfilment here – Eve’s life at uni is a little too perfect, as she immediately becomes the hot, cool, lusted-after lesbian living in a gay sharehouse. But after the trauma of an adolescence spent mostly in isolation, there’s also a sense that she deserves to have all her dreams come true – for a time at least.
This isn’t to say that Eve herself is perfect. Her pain causes her to make spontaneous, sometimes bad decisions, and to close herself off to other people’s feelings in a way that triggers some of the central conflicts of the novel. At times she comes across as callous, bordering on unlikable. But the scenes where Eve is stepping into her identity are a welcome alternative to commonplace narratives of queer pain.
Later, when Eve is once again without Nell, she is more guarded, holding herself back from intimacy because of what she believes she’s done to Nell. When Lake asks her about Nell’s absence, Eve imagines herself as a poisonous medusa jellyfish: “Nell was destroyed. By Eve.” Whether this is true or not (and the reality is that Nell is hardly a naive dupe), Eve’s shame introduces an interesting dimension to her already complex identity as a queer single parent. She is desperate to be a good mother to Lake, while simultaneously convinced of her own monstrous inability to truly love. Across the 18-year span of the narrative, Gray considers the tipping point between friend and family, asking what we owe to the ones we call our own.
Gray’s debut novel, Green Dot, cast a much snarkier lens on love and desire. In Chosen Family, the humour feels a lot more generous, expansive enough to admit the cruelties of human behaviour without giving in to them. Gray masterfully conducts the energy of the narrative, letting it swell with the desires and hurts of adolescence before introducing the rich notes of adult joy and grief. Through its complex, sometimes savage, sometimes tender portrayals of its characters, Chosen Family is an ode to best friends, queer loves and the families we make from them.
Chosen Family by Madeleine Gray is out now in Australia (Simon & Schuster, $34.99) and will be published in the UK on 29 January (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20).
