Madeleine Gray’s first novel Green Dot (2023) was a witty account of a messy office affair whose fans included Nigella Lawson and Gillian Anderson. Her follow up, Chosen Family, is an altogether more expansive book. She has said described it as “the result of years of thinking obsessively about two things for a long time. First, why is it that every queer person I know (including me) has a story about having an intense friendship breakup in high school that years later they realise was probably their queer root? […] Two, why do more people not choose to have children with their platonic best friends? Surely raising a child with someone you trust implicitly and don’t have sex with makes more sense than the other way round?”
The novel is set in Sydney and has a dual timeline, spanning 18 years between the school days of Eve and Nell to their adulthood and becoming parents. In 2006, Nell “does not enjoy being twelve years old. Adults around her are always telling her that she’s too smart for her age. Nell often finds it difficult to tell these adults that they are too old to be so stupid.”
