Melanie Cheng is a Melbourne-based, award-winning writer and general practitioner of Chinese-Australian descent. Her short story collection, Australia Day (2017), won the 2018 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction. Her debut novel, Room for a Stranger (2019), was shortlisted for the 2020 NSW Premier’s Multicultural Award and longlisted for the 2020 Miles Franklin Award. Cheng has also appeared in journalism outlets such as The Guardian, The Age, and The Griffith Review. She was also a health columnist for The Saturday Paper in 2021. Her latest book, The Burrow (2024) was shortlisted for the 2025 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction.  

 

The Burrow is a story about how a family deals with grief years after the death of their baby, Ruby. It showcases the strain in the family that is now challenged by the arrival of a new pet rabbit, and on top of that, the kids’ grandmother, Pauline, who is crashing in their house until her broken arm gets better.  

We know that this story came to you during a writing slump in the middle of the pandemic. Which one came to you first, the plot or a character you built the story around?  

I’ve always come to a story really with a premise, rather than characters. With my first novel, Room for a Stranger, it was this homeshare arrangement between an elderly woman and an international student. I just thought that it was a really interesting, unlikely kind of pairing in a domestic setting, and then the characters came from there.  

With The Burrow, I’ve had this idea for a story about a family that was dealing with a sudden accidental loss. We so often hear of stories from that acute phase of grief, and this story is meant to show you how the family functions years after the incident. What’s interesting to me, especially as a working GP and seeing patients in the longer aftermath of the loss, is that difficulty when the world has moved forward but they’re still, you know, intensely grieving and feeling stuck. It was such a sad story that I had some hesitation writing, and it was really only when i took in this rabbit for my family that I became interested in the idea of a family coming together over the shared caring of a pet that I thought: oh, hang on, this can be the softness of the story, one that will counter the darkness of the grief. 

 

This book shows people dealing with grief in different ways and at different paces. How did you approach characters dealing with preemptive guilt from that? Like how Pauline immediately hops on a cruise after the incident, and is unable to explain herself.  

This tragedy is accidental, and this family is not a family of faith; they’re very scientific, they believe in cause and effect. When an accident happens, they tend to look at what they did wrong, and they fixate on their responsibility in it. And so, each of these family members is nursing immense guilt and shame for what happened to baby Ruby. And so, all the characters are left interpreting each other’s behaviour because they don’t actually talk about what happened, and if you don’t understand the thoughts behind behaviour, these behaviours can seem strange to you. Like you mentioned how Pauline went on a cruise immediately after the incident. It seems at odds with what a normal person would do in that circumstance, but once you understand that she is really grappling with the role she played in the death, then you’d understand that she was trying to escape, and also trying to, I guess, give her family time away from her. She’d feel that they would see her role in the tragedy, that it would be triggering for them to see her.   

On Amy’s guilt, I think it’s important because Amy, as a parent, has to continue to function. She has to continue to care for her daughter even though she herself is grappling with enormous shame for not being there, and depression. She does do the practical necessary things to get her fed, bathed, and clothed, helping Lucie with homeschooling. She still shows up, but emotionally, she can’t be there; she’s almost siloed in her grief, and really, it was always going to take some kind of momentous and perhaps unwelcome disruptions for this family to finally start talking to one another again. And those disruptions arrive in the form of, firstly, the rabbit, and secondly, Pauline.  

I liked how you drew parallels between burrows and real-life objects that resemble it, like the princess bed canopy, the KF94 mask, Fiver’s burrow, and the bathtub where Lucie occasionally still lies down. Personal burrows.   

Thank you. 

Could you tell us something about seeing your loved ones grieve in a way you’ve now outgrown? What happens when one character’s hopefulness only reminds the other of how naive they once were? 

Yes, for Jin and Amy both, I think it has its basis in this very scientific outlook on the world. When you have that belief in cause and effect, what happens is that every single action you take has unseen or unforeseen potential consequences, and that is an enormous burden to bear; in a way, it can be paralysing.  

Lucy's praying was a way to allow herself to believe that there is some higher purpose, so that she doesn’t have to feel responsible for every bad thing that happens to her or the family. So I think whilst Amy, as a non-religious person, finds this confronting, you see at the end of the chapter that she actually starts to ask if it works, which is really demonstrating some openness to a different way of thinking, relinquishing some of that control over what has happened. Starting to go along the path of eventual healing.  

And what we see in the story is that some characters try to reclaim some control over this in very unscientific ways. For Jin, he reverts to what he calls magical thinking or superstitious thinking, which was a feature of his childhood. He starts to do things in a certain order, not wanting to throw things away to avoid bad luck. You know it's a kind of ... return.  

There was a part in the book where Amy feels as though her ‘wow maybe i’m kind of being a bad mother right now’ the circumstances reaffirm internalized misogyny thoughts, was any of it inspired by real life events as a GP?   

I think as a mother, you do see some of the inequalities between society’s expectations of mothers and fathers. In the book, for instance, Amy reflects on how when Jin goes away for his business conferences, he can simply leave without having to think about the logistics of the household and getting things in order. If anything, when he comes home, everything’s the same or even a bit neater, and everyone’s glad to see him. Whereas Amy is so involved in the domestic day-to-day process that it’s much more difficult for her to leave.  

This does take from personal experience, you know, just to come here to the Sydney Writers Festival, there were many things that I had to put into place back home, like making sure the children got to their various school activities, that they get picked up on time, that their lunch orders are set. Yeah, it’s the mental load that a lot of mothers bear.  

Which character do you find it hardest to write? 

I think that Pauline was the character least like me in terms of age and circumstance. I feel a connection to Amy because she’s a mother, a writer, and of similar age to me, with all the similar competing demands on her time and emotional labour. I feel a connection to Jin because we both have Chinese heritage and we’re both doctors. And Lucy is really a version of me. I was an introverted child, and as a child, I spent a lot of time thinking about death. In fact, now that I have my own children, I realise that death is something that children do think about; there’s a time they turn their minds to it. But, yeah, Pauline. I’m not a grandmother, I'm not divorced, so perhaps she’s a little bit more challenging to inhabit. But it was a lot of fun! I reassured my mother after she read the book that she is not Pauline. But of course, she does share many characteristics of Pauline from a generational point of view. All that generational gap of, you know, Pauline thinking, ‘just get on with it’, that kind of stoic approach, not really buying into some of the psychological theories around grief and mental health.  

I think many of us have an idea of how we would react when an incident happens, and when that difficult situation arrives, we don't always end up behaving in the way we expect we will. I think what I’ve learned through my practice as a GP is that how people grieve is very personal, and that we all need to be more accepting of that.  

 

After writing something emotionally layered like this, do you feel more drawn to write about people again in the future? Or maybe something lighter?   

I always come to work with an interesting premise, that’s the first starting point. The big themes usually only emerge during the process of writing the story, so I can't say yet, but I'm interested in being as truthful as possible in a book. I tend to gravitate towards big themes around family, love, and connection. I like the quote from James Baldwin, which says that every writer only has one story to tell, because I do believe that if you look at any author and you read all their works, you’ll see these preoccupations that come up time and time again. For my next book, whatever form it will take, I suspect that once again it will touch on human connection and hopefulness. 

Davina Abigail is a UNSW Commerce student. Interested in themes of girlhood and self mythology, she writes to make sense of the accidental rites of passage that shaped her, which no matter how dastardly, are sacred in their own right.