Madeleine Gray is a Sydney-based writer whose debut novel Green Dot received international publication, earning her the 2024 Matt Richell Award for New Writer of the Year at the ABIAs (Australia Book Industry Awards), and the 2025 Russell Prize for Humour Writing. Beyond fiction, Gray has also built a name in criticism: being a CA-SRB Emerging Critic in 2019, and shortlisted for the 2021 Walkley Pascall Prize for Arts Criticism. She holds a Master of Studies in English from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Literary Theory from the University of Manchester. 

Madeleine Gray’s second novel, Chosen Family, follows the beautifully volatile relationship of Eve and Nell, whose entanglement begins in school, where two very different experiences of alienation lead them to make sanctuaries of one another. Gray imbues the theme of projection throughout the story, how it allowed both women to misinterpret each other, creating emotional narratives that, at times, override genuine understanding. 

In my conversation with Gray, we talked about how people can continue loving each other while subconsciously carrying resentment for older versions of the relationship that once operated unevenly, even after both parties have changed for the better. 

This book is a layered work of queer attachment: adoration in its most masochistic form. 

What was the thought process behind writing Eve and Nell’s characters? 

I started writing Eve first. I wanted to see her as a 30-year-old single mother because her co-parent has left, and really, I just worked backwards from there. 

As a writing exercise that I often do, I try to imagine what my characters were like in high school to work out what they would be like as adults, because I feel like people don't change that much. So, I went back to Eve, the character in high school, and I was like, okay, I want to make her an outsider, in a way. She's got a single mum that she doesn't have a great relationship with, so she's already got a sense of how to feel all the emotions of a room in her own house, let alone at school. 

Then it was about knowing that she’s different, but not quite how yet. I feel like that kind of nascent identity-making is very much a part of everyone growing up, but particularly if you have an inkling that you might be queer—which is definitely something that I experienced in high school—you're so on edge all the time because you're trying to work out if other people can see you as different and you don't really even know how you're different. So, I kind of started with that prospect. 

Then I wanted Nell to be Eve's match. I wanted her to finally meet someone who was like, ‘oh my god, you see the world the same way as I do, and life is exciting now!’, because those are my favourite relationships to write about. I think there's nothing much better in life than finding a friend who makes you excited to live.

When I put my name down, honest to god, I thought, ‘Okay, I've got to take Madeleine Gray’s book, because of Green Dot’. 

I then got blindsided by a familiar theme; how really early in the book we see a character struggling with the awkwardness of being the writer friend and simultaneously the least culturally developed person in the friend group. 

(Laughs.) Yeah, being the writer friend, not yet up to par with the others intellectually, feeling like shit about it and then feeling jealous, all the things. 

In my opinion, the power imbalance in that kind of dynamic takes longer to process because it doesn’t really present itself as a problem—sometimes you’d have to learn to understand what it is through your own admiration, animosity, and more. Do you think writing becomes a way for Eve to regain control over situations and how she feels about them?

Eve is a storyteller. That's how she deals with everything. 

When Eve comes to know Nell, their references are so different. Nell has access to all things high culture—although I don’t really believe in a dichotomy in culture, but as kids, that’s how they’d see it. So, Eve is constantly on the outside because of her smaller lexicon. As she grows up, a way for her to gain power in her relationships is to read everything she can, everything that has ever existed. She doesn't really have first-hand experience of anything, so stories are her way of getting access to the world. 

Then, when she grows up a bit, and she meets Nell, and everything that she tells herself about Nell is a revision of a story that she'd already been writing in her head for a really long time. Eve tries to write different narratives into these experiences to, at times, make herself feel less guilty and, at times, absolutely wallow in the guilt. Now that Eve is 30, she's also aware of the absolute power of stories, how one person can try and claim a story as their own, and that claiming can be in a way an owning and a destroying. So, we have to be really careful about what stories we tell. 

Eve thinks hard about how to live, whereas Nell is simply living—not out of ease, but because she highly disdains other people. Both of them learned to move through the world from the households they were raised in. Do you think that people can spend so much time trying not to become the people that raised them that they end up rethreading the very materials they so resist in completely different ways?

I think we can certainly get into patterns really young and continue to mindlessly do them for a long time. 

The irony of the novel is that Eve and Nell are hypothetically trying to establish a new family dynamic that is non-normative, that doesn't rely on heteronormative tropes of ‘mum’ and ‘dad’, that's about community, and care ethic; what's funny about it is that, at its core, lies basic human emotions of greed, guilt, shame and desire. Even when you're trying to do something really utopian.

Nell is just so burned by the world when she's young. Then comes Eve, and Nell kind of deifies her, sees her as a portrait of moral goodness because of the forgiveness she bestows, but because of it, fails to see her complexities as a person. I suppose, with certain people, we tend to freeze them in a moment and not allow them to grow. 

What interests you in writing characters that are constantly re-evaluating themselves?

I think it’s just because that's what humans do. I've never been interested in writing just nice characters who do nice things with each other, because I think every person contains multitudes. 

But in terms of the constant re-evaluation, it’s because this book is set over 18 years, and it's a long period of time to write about characters. For [Chosen Family], a really interesting thing for me as a writer is to have the past and the present interlace; I wanted to have the past constantly emerging into the present, like tides. I don’t think we as humans ever stop re-evaluating ourselves, which is—I don’t want to spoil too much, but—why the ending isn’t as clear-cut as the readers might’ve preferred. It's very different from what I've done with Green Dot. 

On the topic of chosen family, it’s easy to value it so highly over everything else because it’s chosen. What does it look like when it’s lived out over time? How does it change? I mean, you don’t find the same person twice, not even in the same person. 

When it comes to chosen families, especially in the queer community, but also in any community where you haven't gotten emotional sustenance from your own biological family, and you make a family of your own with your friends, the stakes are high! It’s high because you haven’t found a connection any other way, now you have, and you're so excited by it, it's so freeing that when things turn out not to be as perfect as you hoped, it's almost a double blow. 

The book doesn’t directly answer that question, but it certainly explores it, because if Eve and Nell were not so obsessed with each other and the idea that the other one would solve their lives, perhaps they would have let the friendship go.

One of the major problems is that they are terrible at communicating with each other, and there's also the added element of shame in both of them, which stops them from being truthful with each other. With Nell, the shame is what she did as a child or teenager; with Eve, the shame is that she has suggested there is forgiveness, but really, there isn't. And maybe there is some forgiveness, but not in a total way. So they don’t want to say the whole truth to each other, because if they do, they'll have to reckon with the fact that neither of them has been that good to each other.

I think there's a line in the book that says, “love is a chess game” 

God, it’s all a confidence trick, it’s all a battle of imaginary wants: love is a chess game played in two people’s heads, and it never ends.

That was the kind of thematic pull of their relationship for me.

Eve has an infantile reason for wanting a kid, in the sense that she wants to create a family that is much better than the one she had. In a way, that’s really basic, but I think with Lake, Eve is creating something new. Lake is raised in a community with Marcus and Tae, with their friends at the queer bar.

I also wanted to look at the dynamics of a biological parent and a co-parent who is not the biological parent. That’s something that really interests me, because my son is my stepson, and I came into the role when he was about two. It's really beautiful, but it does work differently than the biological bond if you're step-parenting because you have to kind of establish love in a different way, it takes a bit longer, it's not there immediately, and it's about two people learning to trust and value each other. Nell is there from Lake's conception, but she also has the burden in her own mind, thinking, ‘Am I as important as Eve to Lake? Am I a spare mother?’  and these are all things that step parents and people feel all the time— biological parents as well. I feel like they're kind of ugly feelings that we don't want to admit to when raising children. So, I wanted to explore Eve and Nell's dynamic parenting for my own sake. 

Do you think intimacy can be harmful to identity when you realise so much of yourself is influenced by that other person, intellectually more than all else?

I think that two people can make each other better. 

I really do think that is the case, and when you find a connection with someone, you kind of become symbiotic, which can be a really good thing. At the same time, you should never lose track of the core of who you are. You should know that you would be okay without the other person. I think, with Eve and Nell, they both need to know that they could be sustainable without each other, and then come together to make each other better. But because they grow together like a nucleus, they are so inextricably bound in a way that limits their individual growth. It’s certainly a pattern to be stuck in for a long time.

Now about the book as a whole! Which parts of the book did you find most difficult to write?

(Laughs.) I think what made the book so hard to write was the fact that it was my second book! In the sense that the first book had gone really well, and people now expected things from me. Which is freeing in a way because it means people believe in you, but also really stressful because I want to do a good job. My mind is not very scientific. For me, it was honestly just keeping track of where everything was and making sure the plot rose at the right time—crescendo, then back down. I have writer friends who are very plot-driven, and they’ll have whole whiteboards and documents, and I really just have one Word document. 

But in terms of scenes, it’s the scenes that kind of revealed themselves, scenes that I didn't know would be important. Like with the girls at the swimming pool at the very beginning of the book. I kind of wrote that to get a sense of who they were, and I ended up writing about being shamed for pubic hair for like half a day! It ended up being kind of funny that one of the most shameful things when you're a kid actually had some emotional heft to it that I didn't realise when I started writing it.

Have readers responded to the book in ways that have surprised you?

(Grins.) I mean it's always a surprise that anyone reads my books to start.

No, come on.

It's true, though! You know, there are so many books in the world, so it's an honour that anyone chooses [mine] over something else. And of course, this book has been really special. A few of the responses I've gotten have come from older women looking back on their teenage friendships and reconsidering them a bit.

I wanted to write a story that felt true and authentic and not a PR-approved version of what we should think Chosen Family is. As a queer writer in particular, there is a kind of feeling that maybe I should just be saying that there's utopian joy in all queer relationships, because in so many ways, queer people are still fighting for their rights. A lot of the political impetus in the past has been about ‘Love is Love’, and I get the imperative there, I understand it, but it also has a way of flattening queer lives, suggesting that they don’t have as much nuance as other people’s lives, and that’s not my jam.

The other thing that I've loved, which is what I really wanted for this book, is that it’s really for everyone. I think that, sometimes, when a book is labelled as a queer book, straight people think it's not for them, and that's absolutely not the case. I really wanted the people who embraced Green Dot to embrace these characters with the same love and affection despite the fact that they might have had, you know, very different life experiences than the women in this book; and that has happened—which has been really really exciting for me! As a queer person, I grew up reading straight books with straight characters and trying to imagine myself in them. You’ll come to empathise with different people all the time, and that's just what you have to do if you're reading fiction, watching TV, or seeing films! It's really nice to have it the other way around, to have people come to see themselves in a queer book and imagine themselves in those people’s shoes. I'm very happy that I've been able to do that.

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Abigail is a Commerce student at UNSW. She is interested in media surrounding pop culture discourse, contemporary girlhood, and all the fun theatrics of the human connection. Her writing is just as erratic as the person, oscillating between self-effacement and god complex—with an absence of middle ground. Arguably, as all the memorable ones are. 

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