Madeleine Gray remembers the first time she had an inkling that her debut novel might become a big deal. When she received news of her advance from her agent, she was “expecting a pittance”; the number was in the six figures. “I thought: holy fuck, there’s been a mistake,” the 31-year-old author laughs. “By the time Green Dot was published last autumn, it had already been hailed as one of the most anticipated novels of the year, and was quickly beloved, drawing comparisons with Bridget Jones, Fleabag and Annie Ernaux. Nigella Lawson and Gillian Anderson posted praise for the book.
Were those celebrity endorsements exciting, I ask her. “I’m gay,” she replies, her enthusiasm leaping through the screen; “are you kidding?! I follow Gillian on Instagram, obviously.” When she saw Anderson post a selfie with the book, “the scream that came out of me was primal”.
Gray is speaking to me from her Sydney apartment; a late evening sun illuminates the colourful arrangement of vases and books stacked on adjoining shelves. She is chatty and relaxed, her conversation peppered with flashes of humour, which is unsurprising given the profusion of comedy in her novels. Green Dot’s 24-year-old protagonist, Hera, is funny, mean, yet vulnerable, teetering on the knife edge of gen Z nihilism while trying desperately to believe in something. In this case, that “something” is unfortunately a shy and elusive fortysomething married man with whom she has an affair. It’s a terrible idea, but as Hera, hopelessly self-aware to a fault, tells us: “What is lust, if not generosity persevering?”
Gray is grateful for what has been a fairytale debut novel story, though one unforeseen outcome is that her Instagram inbox is filled with confessions from strangers about their extramarital affairs, including from men who tell her the book helped them understand their mistresses. “It’s difficult because I don’t want to be actively rude to anyone,” Gray says, but “I’m not a psychologist, and I shouldn’t be giving advice”. Besides, her novel isn’t an autobiography: “I made it up.” The success of the book also compounded the difficulty of second novel syndrome. “I spent a few months being very dramatically pained, [thinking] I don’t know how to write a book,” Gray says. Her wife, a musician, helped. “She has released many albums, and she said to me: darling, this will never go away. It’s not just your second book; every piece of art you create, you will feel the same way.”
Inspiration struck when Gray was having a conversation with a friend about a very thirtysomething topic: babies. Many of her friends, she says, want to have children but don’t have a romantic partner, and aren’t drawn to single parenting. She and her friend started to think: “Why don’t more people have babies with their platonic best friends? The saying goes: it takes a village to raise a family.”
The result is her second novel, Chosen Family, which follows two childhood best friends, Eve and Nell, from their painful adolescence to becoming mothers in their 30s. In their case, attempts at platonic co-parenting are complicated by the fact that one party is desperately in love with the other, a nod to another phenomenon that inspired the book. “I myself as a queer person have experienced this – and every queer person I’ve ever met has – of having a really intense friendship breakup in high school,” Gray says. “And then years later, they look back and think: ‘Oh, I was probably in love with that person.’”
A saga of life-changing friendship over the decades, the novel moves between several time frames. At a private girls’ school in Sydney in the 2000s, pin-ups of male heartthrobs from TV shows The OC and Gossip Girl fill the lockers, the popular girls are blond menaces and a lesbian is the worst thing someone can be. Cut to 2024 and a 30-year-old Eve has emerged as, Gray tells me, “the lesbian queen of inner west Sydney” while Nell tries to come to terms with her own queerness.
“One of my favourite things in life and in literature is when a character meets their match. Finally there’s this magical thing where someone else sees the world as you do,” Gray says.
While it can be seductive to imagine that alternative familial arrangements outside the heterosexual nuclear model can be automatically utopian, Gray’s novel complicates the picture by examining the shifting power dynamics between Nell and Eve against the backdrop of Sydney’s lesbian community (fans of Green Dot may spot a cameo from a side character in the new novel). “It’s a big move to name a book Chosen Family,” she says. “It’s a big term in the queer community, and has so many connotations of queer utopianism. I wanted to look at the idea that family is family, no matter what way it’s constructed. And sometimes when you treat your friends as family, you can treat them worse.”
Gray attended a private girls’ school in Sydney, similar to the one in the book. The author, who is bisexual, “put my sexuality on hold until I left school” as “coming out was not a safe thing to do”. Writing the novel was an exercise in imagining what it would have been like if someone had been openly queer in that environment (the answer: “horrific”). The youngest of three children, she quickly fell in love with reading during long summers spent on the coast of New South Wales with her father, a barrister. An early lesson in fiction writing came in the final year of school: a story she wrote was awarded the highest marks in the state, but when excited friends and family asked to read it, she refused. “It was just so clearly ripped from my own life. I was quite bitchy about people I knew. It was a good lesson: you should really make things up.”
Before she turned to writing novels, Gray was an academic and literary critic, and completed a master’s at Oxford before undertaking a PhD in English and American studies at Manchester. But her plans to live in the UK long-term were cut short when, nine months into her PhD, the pandemic arrived. “I was totally estranged, trying to do the hardest intellectual work that I’d yet done, in a bedroom that had no windows.” She flew back to Sydney, and completed her studies remotely. Soon after Green Dot was published, her life would change again: Gray became a stepmother to her now-wife’s toddler, which has “changed me in every way that could exist”.
“It’s been trust-building for years,” she says. “When we met, he didn’t love me. I didn’t love him. Love is something we’ve made together, over time. We should talk about this more with step-parenting.” At the recent wedding, her stepson asked Gray: “Can I call you mama now?” She cried. “It was so cute. Something about the ceremony of [the day] clicked for him.” Becoming a parent has encouraged Gray to use multiple perspectives when writing fiction, “because every day I spend time with this little boy who has such a different way of seeing the world. Also, I write faster, because I don’t have as much time.”
Gray is now a full-time writer, and is working on a novel set in a different time period, which she describes tantalisingly as “Germaine Greer meets Monty Python”. She is keen to resist categorisation. “I think if my first book had had lesbians as its protagonists, I would have been pigeonholed as a ‘queer writer’, and wouldn’t have the broader audience I wanted,” Gray says. The success of her debut gave her the confidence to write Chosen Family. That “it wouldn’t just be queer people who read it: that’s my dream for this book – that everyone can read it”. And the secret to her uninhibited writing? “I only ever write sex scenes in public,” she says. “There’s something about that intimacy, that charge, when the person opposite you is Googling KPIs. It feels naughty.” Gray is clearly having a lot of fun. “Writing this was kind of joyous,” she says. “I wanted to have a really beautiful queer time.”
• Chosen Family is published on 29 January (W&N). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
