A moving tapestry of a complicated, life-changing friendship

FICTION
Chosen Family
Madeleine Gray
Summit Books, $34.99

In 2023, Sydney-based writer Madeleine Gray took the publishing world by storm with her debut novel, Green Dot, which was praised both in Australia and internationally for its insightful humour.

Now she returns with Chosen Family, a beautifully written, deeply humorous and emotionally resonant story of same-sex desire, love, friendship and culture suffused with wit, intelligence, warmth and empathy.

We first meet the two protagonists, Nell Argall and Eve Bowman, when they’re 12-year-olds in their first year of high school at an all-girls school. Surrounded by the usual coterie of girls mired in adolescent judgment and cattiness, both struggle to make friends and are drawn to one another’s quirks and differences.

Their paths cross when Eve arrives, a new student introduced to a class of girls who have known one another since kindergarten, and soon realises that the popular girls, with whom she has been invited to sit at lunch, aren’t to her liking.

Instead, she gravitates towards the arty and inscrutable Nell, with her “frizzy, mousy brown hair, big brown eyes and gangly limbs”. Slowly, the two build a seemingly impenetrable friendship that jointly guards them against the cruel pettiness of their classmates and allows them both to thrive in their mutual oddity and unusualness; qualities each values in the other.

Madeleine Gray says she wanted to turn her attention to female relationships after the success of Green Dot.Credit: Steven Siewert

Raised by her flighty, emotionally unreliable but open-minded single mother, Emerald, Eve has grown up around queer family friends, and though she does not like the bullying, shaming and cruel innuendo of her classmates, she nonetheless accepts it. Outwardly confident, she deflects jokes with clever comebacks but also wonders “why is the possible orientation of her future sexual desire something that produces such disgust, such fear in others?”

Struggling with her sexuality, she even – very publicly – hooks up with a boy from the local public high school to try and make the teasing stop, but she cannot deny her burgeoning romantic and sexual feelings for her best friend. She spends much of her time questioning whether her feelings are visible to those around her. Thinking about queer family friends, Eve wonders: “Did they see something in her? Is there a way for her to get in touch with them now, to ask, ‘Can you see it? Am I like you?’”

With her razor-sharp prose and obvious connectedness to, and understanding of, her material, Gray, who herself identifies as queer, has written a relatable and contemporary lesbian bildungsroman that is an insightful, profoundly moving tapestry of a complicated, life-changing friendship and relationship that is by turns nourishing and destructive.

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Gray adds a millennial twist to the genre with the fact that the self-realisation of both of her main characters stems less from coming out than coming to terms with the true nature of their relationship with one another. Instead, an enlarged vision encompasses the dominant social and political issues of the day. These are examined, however, from a lesbian perspective alert to the ways in which gender and sexuality are implicated in wider structures.

Although Gray privileges the inner lives of her characters, she also deftly explores the titular concept of “chosen family” in the queer community through Eve and Nell’s (perhaps misguided) decision to raise a child together as the closest of friends. Then there’s Eve’s intense, brother/sister-like friendship with a gay male couple, Tae and Marcus, with whom she lives while at university and who introduce her to the vicissitudes of queer society, culture and politics.

Chosen Family oscillates between 2006 and 2024, tracing with humour and discernment Eve and Nell’s close girlhood friendship, its soul-crushing dissolution, their eventual reunification in their 20s and the complications of their romantic and sexual desires for one another, which remain ever-present, silently informing every interaction, conversation and iteration of their labyrinthine relationship.

In so expertly and tenderly delineating the evolution of Eve and Nell’s complex relationship, Gray has written a masterful, engaging and beautiful story of queer love, friendship, self-realisation and self-actualisation that sits more than comfortably alongside other classics of the genre such as Sylvia Brownrigg’s Pages for You, Emma Donoghue’s Hood, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.

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