Madeleine Gray’s Selected Family review – Friends, lovers, or something in between? | imaginary

AAustralian author Madeleine Gray’s award-winning novel Green Dot was a smart and funny tale of a doomed office relationship. Her new novel, The Chosen Family, is a smart and funny story about a complex, life-changing relationship between two women.

Neil and Eve meet when they are 12 years old at a girls’ school in Sydney. Gray’s narrative moves seamlessly back and forth from the 2000s to the present day; As in David Nichols’s novel One Day, we get to know our heroes by meeting them at different moments in their lives, from the pressures of high school to the alcohol-soaked freedoms of college to the frustrations and joys of early fatherhood.

We are told at the beginning that although Nell and Eve have a young daughter, Nell is no longer there – and her mysterious absence keeps us deeply immersed in their story. What went wrong? Who betrayed whom? Can it be repaired?

When they first met, Nell was an only child with wealthy parents who gave her their credit card details but not much else. She’s resigned to being friendless until she meets Eve, a new girl with an unstable single mother. The two are instant allies, loyal to each other, but the mean girls soon begin to sidestep each other. There are rumors that Eve is “Liz”. Feeling a social catastrophe, Nell releases Eve to save herself.

Gray evokes the horrors of school perfectly – “There is something almost sublime about the cruelty of teenage girls; their sheer acidity.” Without Neil, Eve is a lonely “ghost.” But when we meet Eve again at university, we see her coming back to life, making new friends (scene-stealing Marcus and Ty) and beginning to embrace her sexuality. She Googles “how to look more lesbian” before going to class, and on her first outing to a gay bar, she asks if it’s okay to buy another woman a drink, or “patriarchal.”

Gray beautifully depicts Eve’s discovery of her new queer identity, showing how important and exciting it is to find community. But even as Eve enjoys the new joys of lesbian sex, she’s careful not to let anyone get close to her. And when Nelle returns to her life—a defeated, apologetic version of her high school self—Eve becomes a generous friend and someone who fully understands the power of being a generous friend.

Beneath their tentative reunion, other questions remain: What do they really feel about each other? Are they friends or something more? Were those school bullies up to something? The lingering wounds from their younger years become more apparent when Eve suggests that they raise a child together as friends, using sperm donated by one of their gay male housemates (“Inseminate me, baby!”). Despite the doubts, Neil goes along with it.

Relationship novels typically use female friendship as a place where characters go to discuss their love lives—a kind of narrative breakout zone—but there is often an equal intensity to the “main” romances. For example, Sally Rooney’s book, A Beautiful World, Where Are You, features long emails sent between two women, whose relationship with each other is arguably as compelling as that with men. The Chosen Family explores this unspoken possibility: Can the deep love between women be put at the center of the story? Could you form a different kind of partnership, or a new kind of family?

But besides that, there is the terror of losing your best friend if things go wrong. Both Neil and Eve are obsessed with the story of Medusa. Nell became an artist and her work shows images of snake-headed Gorgon admirers turned to stone. The idea of ​​fossilization – in every sense of the word – runs through the novel. The two women hide things from each other because the stakes are too high.

This sharp, brilliantly readable book explores friendship, parenting, love, lust, self-deception, and all the ways in which these things intersect. It exposes the cruelty we inflict on those closest to us and asks us whether we are capable of finding new, truer ways of loving.