Rewind two years, when Green Dot was practically part of the summer scenery – wedged into beach bags, sunning itself on shelves and earning a reputation as the Australian debut of the season. Madeleine Gray’s first novel, a whip-smart, melancholy-funny story about a young comment moderator who has an affair with an older newsroom colleague, arrived with rare momentum. Word of mouth spread, booksellers championed it, and the celebrity praise rolled in: Nigella Lawson called Gray “a major talent”, while Gillian Anderson deemed her “a dazzling writer”.

Behind the scenes, things had moved just as quickly: a six-figure deal, a six-way auction for the screen rights (now in development with the BBC and British production company Drama Republic, behind Netflix’s One Day). The novel won the Australian Book Industry Award for Best New Writing and the Russell Prize for Humour Writing, and was shortlisted for Debut of the Year at the British Book Awards, missing out to Asako Yuzuki’s juggernaut Butter.

Fast-forward to now, and Gray is back with her second novel, Chosen Family. The “sophomore slump” – that grim little spectre hovering over any successful debut – is very real, she says, though in her case it helped sharpen the resolve to push her work somewhere new.

“I think anyone who wouldn’t feel extra pressure after the first one goes well would be superhuman. I’ve yet to meet that person,” Gray, 31, says. “There was obviously a lot more pressure because I am very lucky in that I have a devoted readership now. Green Dot fans are very vehement, which I love. I didn’t want to disappoint readers, but also, for me, I didn’t want to write the same book twice. I needed to go in a new direction that created a different world.”

Yet the familiar hallmarks – funny, contemporary and attuned to the subtle negotiations that shape friendships and first loves – are all in Chosen Family. The novel unfolds over nearly two decades, tracing the ever-shifting dynamic between two women, Eve Bowman and Nell Argall. They meet at their elite all-girls school in Sydney: both bright, both misfits, both instantly tethered to one another. It’s a relationship that saves them as much as it threatens to unmoor them, particularly as they wrestle with the borders between friendship and romance. When they reconnect at university, the dynamic tilts again, and they decide to raise a child together. “I want to do it with you, Nell. I want us to be best friends who raise a child together,” Eve tells her. The push and pull of their connection sits at the centre of the novel, a bond constantly recalibrating as Lake grows into a preternaturally perceptive child.

After the whirlwind of Green Dot’s publication, Gray returned to finish her PhD in feminist literary theory at the University of Manchester. Then came what she calls, “a mild panic” for another few months as she wondered whether she would be able to write another book. “I know that some writers, by the time their book comes out, they’ve already got another idea ready to go. I am not that person,” she says.

But a conversation with a friend eventually set things in motion: the notion that maybe the neat nuclear-family blueprint was overrated, and that there was something richer in considering families forged rather than forced, and exploring what contemporary platonic co-parenting might look like.

“We were talking about babies because our friends had started having babies. We both were like, ‘Why, on god’s green earth, is there this presumption that we should wait to have a romantic partner before we have a baby?’” Gray says. “So we got chatting about platonic co-parenting and how that would work. They always say it takes a village to raise a baby, we were just thinking about what kind of iterations, what that could look like today.”

The idea resonated with Gray for personal reasons, too. As stepmother to a five-year-old – the child of her wife, artist and musician Bertie Blackman – she has long understood that families don’t arrive fully formed; they grow in all sorts of shapes and sizes. (Gray and Blackman married a few weeks earlier. “It was the best wedding I’ve ever been to,” Gray jokes.) And while Gray says she shares the tiredness of her protagonists, the child, Lake, was inspired not by her own son but by Henry James’ What Maisie Knew.

Her understanding of chosen families stretches back further than adulthood. Gray’s parents separated when she was five, and she spent alternating five-day stretches with each of them. She struggled, as a child, to adapt to her father’s new partner, Helen, with whom she is now close. That early experience of being a stepchild, and of now seeing the “other side” of the family dynamic, fed into Chosen Family. It helped her think more kindly about her own place within the structure, and, crucially, about what is best for a child like Lake: having people rooting for them from all directions.

“It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Gray says of being a stepmother. “Definitely also the most joyous, of course. As people say about parenting, the old kind of aphorisms ring true, but it’s really challenging.

“It has been 3½ years of slowly growing into a relationship that we’ve made our own. It’s not defined by, well, you have to love me because I made you, it’s something different, and that’s been challenging but extremely special.”

‘So much of the discourse around Green Dot was whether it was part of this subgenre of sad girl novels, which was something I had to really work through in my own mind.’

Madeleine Gray

After Green Dot’s forensic look at male-female power dynamics, especially the messier entanglements between older men and younger women, Gray found herself turn her gaze toward a different kind of intimacy.

“It was time for me personally to shift gears, and to think about female friendships and female relationships, and certainly a huge part of that is because they’ve been for me the most formative relationships in my life,” she says.

It’s those relationships – the devotion, the volatility, the proto-erotic charge of teenage female friendships – that Chosen Family captures so well. Gray has written before about her own experiences of being bullied at high school, and the novel’s setting, an elite all-girls school, allowed her to explore a very specific blend of “cruelty and intimacy”, and a queer awakening within that environment.

“In the queer community, which I’m happily part of, almost every queer person I’ve ever talked to tells me about a friendship break-up they had in high school, and it was devastating to them at the time, and then years later they look back and they think, ‘Oh there was actually quite a bit more to it, and I think maybe I had feelings for that person that I couldn’t quite articulate yet’,” she says. “And it was devastating because there was that romantic or, like, proto-erotic tension that you couldn’t quite recognise when you’re a teenager.”

There is, however, one small jibe to Green Dot: the novel became wrapped up in the broader discourse around the so-called “sad girl novel”, a term applied so liberally that it became a catch-all for Millennial women writing about interiority. In Gray’s new novel, as Eve edits a manuscript, she notes, “the cultural appetite for this kind of woman has diminished over the past few years. Everyone liked sad women until they decided that there were bigger problems in the world than feminine malaise.”

“I couldn’t help it,” Gray concedes. “Because so much of the discourse around Green Dot was whether it was part of this subgenre of sad girl novels, which was something I had to really work through in my own mind.

“Because when you’re part of that conversation, it’s great because it means that you’re part of the conversation but at the same time I fundamentally disagree with the premise that a sad girl novel exists in the sense that it’s just women who are unimpressed with the forces that control capitalism...so I think it’s pretty belittling to say sad girl novel.”

Whatever you call it, Green Dot clearly hit a nerve. Gray still receives messages from readers, often people in the middle of affairs, treating her as a safe confessional space.

“I’ve also had men reach out to say, thank you so much for writing Green Dot, it’s helped me understand my mistress’s perspective, and I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s not what I was intending’,” she jokes.

Gray was involved in the TV adaptation, initially writing the pilot, but the work became too time-consuming. She has since stepped back to an executive producer role.

“I’m glad that I did make that decision because in the time that it’s taken to kind of get to this point with television, I’ve written another book. So I think it was the right move, but that being said, I’d love to continue to learn to write for television because it’s such a fun medium to work with.”

There might be another opportunity soon. Gray says there are early discussions about screen rights for Chosen Family. Meanwhile, she is touring the book in Australia, before heading to the UK and US, and is in the early stages of her next novel. It will take a little longer, she says: it’s set in the past, not the present, and will require more research. Watch this space.

Chosen Family is out now via Summit Books.

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