Emma Neale has a couple of anecdotes that provide useful background to her new novel Maybe Baby. There is quite a gap of time between them and they speak to the novel’s themes in different ways, but they’re both instructive.
The first played out more recently, though still a few years back.
Neale was driving one of her children to a sports fixture, with the other one along for the ride. It was one of those rushed, fraying sort of moments.
‘‘Abe and I both saw this young person walking. Actually, it might have been in the Octagon. Walking along. Very tall. Very elegant in a long flowing black dress. Bright red lipstick, but stubble as well. And I think Abe said something like ‘look at that cool style’. And I said, ‘Oh, I think that person is very unhappy with their body’.’’
What Neale had noticed was how thin they were, as if they might have been starving themselves — and said as much: ‘‘It’s obvious that they’re not happy with their body, what they look like.’’
Abe wasn’t having it, insisting they looked fantastic, confident in their identity and happy to be out in the world.
It gave Neale pause, caught out, as she thought later, displaying a social conservatism she didn’t know was lurking. She wondered then what Abe’s generation might encounter at some point in their future, that would deliver them their own ‘‘fuddy-duddy’’ moment.
The second anecdote is from further back.
‘‘My kids get really sick of me telling this anecdote,’’ she says. ‘‘But when I was about 18, Time magazine had a picture of the Earth on the cover and it was talking about the Gaia hypothesis and global warming and I read this article and felt completely overwhelmed by it.’’
The upshot was, she told her physician father she thought she should have her uterus removed or her tubes tied, as her generation probably shouldn’t have children.
‘‘He took it very well, considering.’’
But while expressing admiration for her principles and the strength of her conviction, her father suggested no doctor in their right mind would do that to a healthy 18-year-old woman — adding that she may well change her mind in her 30s.
‘‘I was really grumpy with him. ‘How do you know what I feel!’. But I took it on board and, sure enough, when I was in my 30s that perspective shifted.
‘‘And I said, you know, on the one hand I’m intensely grateful for my kids, and on the other hand I think, ‘what a world I’ve brought you into’. I think it’s possible to do those two things at the same time.’’
What might test the limits of Gen Z’s permissive reframing of gender, norms and roles? And after several more decades of the climate crisis, how do a new generation of parents view the prospect of parenthood?
Maybe Baby has been a while in the writing, so its long gestation has covered years in which these issues have been very much on the public mind.
Indeed, it is landing in bookshops just as a new alarm sounds about the prospect of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) collapsing, and as the tentative progress we might have made on gender is being shouted down by the manosphere, while tradwives are everywhere online — insisting on well-ironed aprons, if insisting is all right with you.
It’s not the author’s role to saywhat message readers should take away from their work, Neale says.
However, as far as gender is concerned, the reductive framings peddled by the manosphere are the very antithesis of the nuanced portrait of masculinity she was interested to explore, she says.
Her leading man, Nate, is allowed to be tender, afforded the opportunity of emotionality as he navigates life’s big questions, right up to and including new life.
As the book blurb says: ‘‘Nate, a grieving widower, is determined to honour his late wife and find a way to have the child they were desperate to raise together.’’
As is appropriate to a story taking on complex issues, Nate and the rest of Maybe Baby’s cast are the work of some years.
Indeed, Neale began work back in 2015 or 2016, right off the back of her Ockham short-listed novel Billy Bird.
She thought, she says, it was going to be a faster process. But life comes along, and she took on the role of Landfall editor in 2017, which had a powerfully gravitational effect on her time.
‘‘I found I couldn’t keep a really large project in mind while I was editing.’’
So, it went on the back burner; was actually set aside for a while.
Then there were the false starts. Aspiring novelists everywhere might be pleased to learn that of such a practised hand as Neale’s.
‘‘I was thinking about the realistic scientific aspects of the book. But then that became a bit of an obstruction because I’ve never been to Sweden. So, I found myself kind of getting hooked on looking at myself in a negative way, snagging myself on not being able to create the sensory details credibly.’’
Google Earth will get you only so far.
Maybe the United States? But Trump’s twin attacks on science and progressive thinking meant that was a no-go.
The solution was to move the action to England. But Neale was still wrestling with the science and the need for it to be credible.
‘‘That was one reason I kept hitting these walls and thinking I’m going to have to unravel all of that, rewrite all of that.’’
Which is what she did. Four or five years in and 80,000 hard-won words, she hit delete. On all of it.
It seems a lot to put yourself through, and as an adept in other formats, poetry and short fiction — Neale’s poetry collection Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit won at the Ockhams last year — it’s a trial she didn’t need to face.
But, Neale knows the territory. This is novel number seven.
And her topic, this story, needed some open territory in which to stretch out, to allow Nate to complete his journey.
‘‘I just felt I needed more time to understand the pressures that he was under and what took him to the end of his tether — and for us to understand that, to really understand his psycho-geography or his internal landscape, I felt I needed the space of a novel,’’ she says.
Further conversations with Abe were feeding into the work, discussions about how some traits might seem to be more typically masculine or more typically feminine, but on closer inspection were more about social convention than anything innate.
‘‘That question of where you draw the line is very fascinating and it’s nuanced and I think that’s what a novel can actually do more brilliantly than some other art forms — is it gets to those grey areas and it looks at the layers and the way angles glint and shift, rather than just a really hard line, black or white — this is the way a human has to be or this is the way a man has to be.’’
Nate’s conventionally ascribed male qualities — competitiveness, aggression, stoicism — were rounded out with some more emotionality.
‘‘I hope that he is a more interesting and idiosyncratic character than you might expect, but also that he’s credibly male,’’ Neale says.
It wasn’t easy. At one point she was given feedback indicating Nate was doing a little too much introspection.
‘‘I had to make him more active and get him more involved in actual conversations with people instead of just coming to conclusions in his own head.’’
Again, convention has a view on this.
‘‘I’m kind of curious about that myself, because so often we seem to suggest that the drive for a family comes from the mother but it’s not always true,’’ Neale says.
That rolls into the roles men and women are assigned in care.
Society remains quite prescriptive about what men can think and feel and do, she says.
‘‘It’s still a little bit more unusual for a man to stay at home and look after the kids.
‘‘The book is sort of playing with some of those ideas, trying to open up a discussion about what the roles should be, could be.’’
Of course, any such discussion these days, especially if it is online, can easily become unhelpfully shouty.
Neale explored that possibility in an early draft of Maybe Baby, in which one of the potentially contentious plot points leaked out across social media.
‘‘I had a whole scene where people were reacting on social media. It was a firestorm. But I realised that even that was too black and white, and also the ranting and the negativity that you see on social media, we’re all over it.’’
So, the scene didn’t make the final edit.
Neale hasn’t given much thought to the prospect that her novel might generate a similar reaction in the real world.
‘‘I feel if that’s true then people haven’t really read the book closely,’’ she says. ‘‘They haven’t actually thought about the emotional layers.’’
They would be reacting to the situation in which Nate found himself, rather than the factors informing his response.
‘‘I want people to relate to each other as full and interesting and rich human beings.’’
There is no doubt then that Maybe Baby takes on some weighty issues, zooming in to unpick the dynamics. But this is richly character-driven story-telling, not a polemic. Indeed, another anecdote from the rounds of drafting and editing that a novel goes through underlines where the emphasis was for Neale.
Nate’s best friend Max is a sympathetic and supportive presence through the novel — as he navigates his own adventures in partnering.
‘‘I had a lot more about Max in an early draft and I had to compress, compress, compress so I know him and there’s a lot there that’s just slightly implied in the new draft, but he had a much more spiritual outlook than some of the other characters.
‘‘It’s quite interesting how that happens: you learn about a character’s background through some of the wrong turns that you take and it’s still kind of latent in the book.’’
Some of that depth lingers in an insight Max delivers on the nature of family.
‘‘It calls up two whole bloodlines,’’ he observes of children. ‘‘Running back through time. Two whole flanks of ancestors. At the very least.’’
Elsewhere, Neale’s characters are busy confronting the century’s other pressing dilemmas: how to decode a Tinder profile, how to choose the appropriate emoji and the trick of converting an online connection into a flesh and blood relationship.
‘‘One thing I hope is that despite some of the big issues that it tackles it’s still got a sort of a lightness and a sense of humour to it, so that people don’t feel completely pressed into the ground by it,’’ Neale says of her book.
‘‘I felt like comedy was quite important, both because life is absurd but also because the central concept is quite wacky, but I didn’t want the humour to grow from that, I wanted that to be the credible axis so the humour is laced through other aspects of Nate’s encounters with people.’’
The book
Maybe Baby, by Emma Neale, is out now. The University Book Shop hosts a launchy on May 28 at 5.30.
