Hera, the heroine of Madeleine Gray’s first novel, is 24, which, as she says, ‘seems young to most people but not to people in their mid-twenties’. She lives in Sydney with her father and their dog and works as an online community moderator, but the contents of her work bag reveal her to be Bridget Jones’s edgier little sister: ‘My wallet, three pairs of underpants, headphones, nine tampons, a travel vibrator, two novels, a notebook, two beer caps, a bottle of sake and a fountain pen.’ She will also inevitably be compared to Hannah from Lena Dunham’s Girls and to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag.
Gray’s writing style is droll but if Hera’s internal monologue sounds gauche and affected, it is useful to remember what the average 24-year-old sounds like. When she tells her closest friends her feelings, she reflects to herself: ‘I’ll speak it now and work out if it’s honest later.’ Her cynical schtick is not always palatable, particularly when she describes a colleague as having ‘the embodied exhaustion of a Holocaust museum tour guide’.
