Look around. Everyone is reading this buzzy new novel

Madeleine Gray was three degrees deep – a bachelor’s from Sydney, a master’s from Oxford, and a doctorate from Manchester – when she started writing what she had been studying for so long: fiction about contemporary young womanhood.

“There are a lot of novels at the moment about young women by young women. I, personally, think that’s a really good thing. I don’t have any issue with that. And I just thought for this novel, I’ve been thinking about contemporary young womanhood academically for so long and also, that’s my experience, so I thought, why wouldn’t I write this?”

Not only was Gray reading, studying and now writing about the subject, but she was also selling those very same novels while working at the independent bookstore Better Read Than Dead after returning to Australia from the UK during the pandemic (Gray hit the headlines last year when she helped unionise the staff, winning them an EBA with better pay and conditions).

Madeleine Gray’s Green Dot is about a woman in her 20s who has an affair with an older, male colleague.Credit: Zan Wimberley

“I mean, honestly, I think it helped because there are so many books coming out all the time, I saw that my book might not be a bestseller, but I thought I could probably get it on the table for a week,” Gray, 29, says.

But it looks like Gray’s already-buzzy Green Dot will be on the table for some time. The novel’s journey to publication is the stuff of debutant dreams. Gray sent her finished manuscript to Grace Heifetz at Left Bank Literary who was, conveniently, attending the London Book Fair. A few fair days later the novel had been sold to Australia, Germany, the UK and USA for six-figure deals, and the screen rights nabbed in a six-way international auction.

It’s not hard to understand the interest. Green Dot is a smart, funny and addictive read (allegedly Heifetz left a party in London where Mick Jagger was a guest to finish it). The novel is told from the first-person perspective of Hera Stephen, 24, who takes a job as a comment moderator in a Sydney newsroom and starts an affair with an older married colleague named Arthur, her first relationship with a man. It’s a coming-of-age that is very of-its-age, capturing the ennui of a generation who aren’t quite sure what they’re working for any more, or what it means to live a fulfilling and meaningful life. Hera is both performer and audience; at once agonisingly self-aware and naive, both profoundly cynical and vulnerable.

“I’ve found the source of sustenance I will need to survive this office,” she writes after her first exchange with Arthur. “For two minutes today I have been reminded that I am a person.”

The title is a reference to the online status on the office instant messaging service (think Slack, or G-chats) through which their relationship plays out, and more symbolically perhaps to the confused nature of intimacy today, and what it means to exist online, and offline.

Better Read Than Dead bookshop employees Tahlia Nelson (left) and Madeleine Gray during their bid for an EBA in 2022.Credit: Bianca De Marchi

Young women, of course, have always written and wanted to read, about the experience of young women. But everyone else discovered they could make money from this circa 2017 when Sally Rooney released Conversations with Friends and Kristen Roupenian’s short story Cat Person went viral (this was also not too long after Phoebe Waller Bridge’s Fleabag hit screens).

Publishers suddenly recognised the potential of a demographic with time, money and many years of life left to sustain the industry’s bottom line. “For fans of Sally Rooney” became the selling point of a swathe of new novels, whose homegrown talents include Diana Reid, Pip Finkemeyer, Genevieve Novak and Shirley Le (to name just a few).

Gray says Rooney “gets a lot of shit thrown at her” but considers what the Irish novelist has done for fiction nothing short of revolutionary.

“I remember reading Conversations with Friends, her first book, when it came out and I hadn’t seen any writers writing about the kind of political and ideological interests that I had: thinking about how can you be happy in capitalism, how does queerness play with heteronormativity and power dynamics when there are such money differentials between generations? And then writing it in the present tense in a really relatable way. I think that’s just wonderful. So I wanted to take that on, and then I wanted to queer it even further.”

While some of the criticisms of so-called “millennial women’s fiction” are worth examining, such as the genre’s overriding bias towards a certain kind of experience of young womanhood (straight, wealthy and white), the label has also been weaponised to dismiss an entire generation (and gender) of writers and readers. Gray is ready to take such detractors on.

The publishing and TV rights to Madeleine Gray’s debut have been sold internationally.

“I think the eye roll to millennial women’s fiction is absolutely a symptom of misogyny and internalised misogyny,” Gray says.

“I was talking to someone the other day, a book critic who was like, I’m just sick of reading women. That just seems so strange to me because when I grew up, all the books I read were by men because they were all you know, the books that were in the canon apart from, like George Eliot and Jane Austen. So for me, this is a wonderful turnaround. And I think we should embrace it. The more stories by women, the better,” Gray says.

If young millennial women aren’t writing about young millennial women, Gray questions, who else will?

Predictably, the similarities between Gray and her character – they are about the same age and share a similar academic background, and Gray did work briefly in a newsroom as a “content producer” – have attracted questions about whether the novel is autobiographical. The novel’s cover – the silhouette of a woman who looks like Gray – is perhaps intended to play with this line of questioning. Gray laughs it off, “It’s not a diary”.

“I think that’s a way to belittle because women’s stories can only ever be about one woman and when men write it’s supposed to be about a general human condition,” Gray says.

“If I am in a bad mood that’s a sexist reductive question to assume that women don’t have imaginations but if I’m in a generous mood, I think all fiction is autobiographic.”

The book and screen deals have allowed Gray the financial freedom to focus on writing full-time now. She’s also working on the screenplay for the television show, although the details are still being kept under lock and key. Looks like Gray can well and truly return the eye roll – her green dot is certainly one to watch.

Green Dot, by Madeleine Gray, is published by Allen & Unwin, RRP $32.99.

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