When Nell Argall meets Eve Bowman during their first year of high school in 2006, it’s love at first sight. Crass and bold, Eve is everything Nell wants to be. But, Nell tells herself, she isn’t gay. She loves Eve more like a sister. Like a best friend. Eve is gay, although she hasn’t yet admitted this to herself. Eve loves Nell like family and also something more; Nell is Eve’s safe place, the person who makes her brave enough to face down the bullying that begins the second the popular girls get a whiff of her queerness. Madeleine Gray, in her vibrant, compelling second novel – which was picked up by Oprah in a Sydney bookshop this week – captures this particular aspect of girlhood perfectly when she writes: “There is something almost sublime about the cruelty of preteen girls; the absolute acid of it.”
In 2024, Eve’s life is marked by Nell’s absence. She raises their daughter, Lake, as a single parent, and sees so much of Nell in her. Like Nell, Lake is quick-witted and sharp-tongued. Eve treats her child more like a peer, which puts her on the outs with teachers and other parents. Having been victimised for her queerness during adolescence, adult Eve embraces it as a shield to the point where even other queer parents are intimidated by her; one of them reflects that every time he’s tried to break through her prickly exterior, Eve has “closed up like a pair of twenty-year-old thighs in Advanced Pilates”.
