Emily McBride

Emily McBride’s brainy debut novel, Queen Mab follows Madeleine, a second-year PhD student studying Victorian and Modernist literature, who unexpectedly becomes pregnant. Soon after the birth of her daughter, Madeleine becomes unnerved by her baby and convinced that she was switched at birth by fairies (a nod to the changeling myth in literature).

McBride’s novel is an urban folktale and an original exploration of postpartum depression and psychosis. It joins the burgeoning genre of women’s writing about motherhood, though it is the first novel in this genre that I have read that also addresses topics like precarity in academia, gentrification, and adoptive families.

I have been eagerly awaiting McBride’s debut, and Queen Mab delivered in both the propulsive reading experience and the ways in which addressed political questions around motherhood and raising a child in a city.

At a moment in which conversations around post-partum mental health are extremely pressing, I had the opportunity to speak with McBride over video call about her novel.

Rose Bialer: Queen Mab opens with a wonderful scene where Madeleine realizes she’s pregnant. She feels the first flicker of life inside her as a moth. If writing a novel in any way can be compared to having a child — how did you experience the first flicker of this story?

Emily McBride: Well, I definitely think this novel can be compared to having a child. Partly because of the subject matter, and partly because it started with me having a baby and my response to that, which was nowhere near as extreme as the character’s. But nonetheless, it obviously brought up a lot of reflection, which informed the final story.

The moth that opens the novel was central to everything in the finished product, but it wasn’t the first flicker of the novel. I started with the changeling idea, and the idea of a reversal of what we expect of the changeling story, which I won’t go into super detail, so as not to spoil things. I’ve found for myself that when I have a story that works well, it usually starts out with a very simple idea, which is usually just some kind of reversal of expectation for the reader. That was the case here. Everything else was just adding, adding, adding.

At one point, the moth was sort of buried in chapter three. Later, when I was trying to write a first chapter that would be an effective opening, I remember thinking like, oh, maybe that. Maybe we can move that forward. Then once it was in that place, it became very central to the whole story.

Also Queen Mab is definitely like a baby for me because all my kids were born in the summer, and it has also appeared in the summer. It was published ten years after my first child was born, so it feels like a way of rounding out the decade.

You spend much longer conceiving a novel than you do a child.

For sure. But then once it’s out, it’s set. You don’t have to have teenage arguments with it. 

Very true. I wanted to ask you to come back to this idea. You describe the novel as an urban folktale about motherhood and madness. Does your writing always take on a bent of the magical or was it a style that felt particularly suited to this story?

I don’t always write things with magical or fantastical elements. But I did read a lot of fantasy novels as a child. Not so much adult fantasy novels — I sort of maxed out around twelve or thirteen. But that was an enormous part of my reading education. Even now, I love  novels or stories that are primarily realist, but have some uncanny or magical or slightly mythological element to them. So once I had the idea for this, I knew that it was something I wanted to pursue.

I think that what’s very effective in the novel is you aren’t always  sure what’s real and what isn’t, which mirrors Madeleine’s post-partum experience. Speaking of motherhood and madness, you wrote a wonderful review of two Irish novels that deal with those topics in the Stinging Fly: Soldier Sailor and Milk. You write, “For these writers, to become a mother is to become wild — to be thrown from a place of citizenship and apparent intellectual equality into the wilderness.” Did you feel this to be true in your novel as well?

I was able to write that review in that way because I had spent three or four years thinking about all of these things; I had recently finished this book and so was primed to recognize the patterns. I was trying to read many of the new motherhood books as they started appearing. Not always right in the moment because I wanted to keep my own mental space. But when I did read them, I would notice these recurring patterns. So I was thinking, isn’t it strange how there’s this wilderness aspect in Night Bitch when the woman becomes a dog or in Chouette where a woman gives birth to an owl? In my own book, which I had started before reading either of those, and also in Soldier Sailor and Milk, there is a strong discussion of motherhood in terms of the animal. The kind of chaotic, broken animal, like mechanized farming cows in Milk, and a dying baby bird in Soldier Sailor. I think it was mainly just that I noticed these things more than somebody else might have in that moment because I had been thinking about them for so long.

The most impactful scene for me in Queen Mab was the birth scene because it was just such an intense momentum. You do make references to the animalistic. And I was reading that–I have not given birth, but I was like, oh my god! If this is what birth is, I don’t know if I want to experience this. 

It was an amalgamation. I took everybody’s worst experiences. I’ve been interviewed by people who have given birth and been like, oh, my birth wasn’t like that, and I was like, well, no, like mine wasn’t really like that either.

No, but it can be extremely traumatic and horrible for many people.

I mean, there’s nothing in there that doesn’t happen to people, right? Also about what we were speaking of earlier, I think it is natural that we compare motherhood to animals because it kind of turns you into an animal, which is something I think we’re not used to being in the present day. We know intellectually that we’re animals and that we’re mammals and that we function the same as other animals, but we don’t feel like it. And most of the time, we don’t have to really deal with the physicality of living on that intensive level.

That comes up as a point of tension in the novel with Madeleine having complicated feelings about having a baby while also pursuing the life of the mind, especially as she faces judgment from some of her colleagues in academia. As a mother and a writer, how did you approach this topic?

So as a person who was living in the mind, obviously it was a big shock to have a baby. To suddenly be thrown into a world that was extremely physical, and not just in terms of the birth, but in terms of looking after the baby, and being attached to something 24 hours a day. I think for some people, this isn’t a problem at all. Some people are more physically oriented, or even if they aren’t, they really like the chance to be. But if you’re used to having time alone to think your thoughts, suddenly having no time alone to think your thoughts, and actually not much ability to think your thoughts — if you do get any time alone you’re completely frazzled and sleep deprived and your body is doing weird things — is a big surprise. 

I don’t know if it’s something that maybe affects us even more nowadays than in the past because we tend to have babies later, and so we’ve probably had more time to establish the kind of life that we want. So it is a shock when it is dismantled in front of you, even if it turns out to be a somewhat temporary dismantlement. It doesn’t mean that you’re never going to enjoy life again. This book is not meant to convince people not to have children, although some people have taken it that way. But let’s say it’s a moment of strong pressure. 

I am curious too about the other novels and memoirs that also touch on these topics. Queen Mab is being published amongst a thriving new cadre of contemporary women writers exploring motherhood in fiction and non-fiction. Ayşegül Savaş’s aptly named The Wilderness, Olga Ravn’s My Work are just a few examples. Could you speculate as to why there has been such a burgeoning genre of women’s fiction about motherhood?

It is very curious for me, because it’s true that a bunch of them have come out in the last seven or eight years. I went through a period of wondering if there was just something in the water, but I think it probably has more to do with the Read Women movement that started just before 2014. People started talking about how we don’t read women enough, and men never read women, and we have to support women’s writing. Then, a lot of people started having a year of only reading women. It may have given a boost  to these more “domestic topics.”

I think back to my own state of mind in 2016 when I started thinking of the story. The novel was mostly written in 2019 and 2020. But at the beginning, I had a sense of inferiority about the topic itself, despite thinking it was a topic that should be covered. I wondered if anyone would be interested in a story of a woman home all day with a baby. I think that’s maybe why it ended up being a horror novel in some ways. I wanted to make sure there was drama. And even though I know that you can find drama in quotidian things, it didn’t always feel that way writing it in the late-2010s. The irony is that by the time it was finished, there were so many of these books about motherhood that I was starting to wonder if anybody would want to read another one. Still, mine has fairies!

I’m someone who’s always going to read a motherhood novel.

Yeah, there are people who are having new babies all the time. But, it’s just curious how dramatically the scene had shifted in just those few years.

I mean I do feel very lucky as someone who believes they want to have children. I think now there’s going to be so many books for me to read and help me feel less alone and less crazy when I do.

For real. When I was looking for them in 2016, I found Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work — which is amazing and which everybody should read — but there wasn’t very much else there wasn’t really very much in the way of fiction. And even Rachel Cusk’s book was from 2001.

She was ahead of her time in that sense.

But it’s crazy to think of the reaction she got to it now. How she was pilloried in the press, and everybody was discussing her personal life. I do think things have changed in the discussion of this topic.

Madeleine isn’t the only thing changing throughout the novel. You write so convincingly about the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood she and Tom live in, Splinters. I felt like I knew or had been to Splinters before – its shops with overpriced birthday cards and the revitalizing murals that had almost something ominous about them. How did you come to create Splinters, and what made it the right setting for the story you wanted to tell in the novel?

I’m so happy you asked about Splinters because Splinters is a very precious part of the book to me. I always had this particular neighborhood in mind. In part, because it was a bit grim, but also appealing in a sort of grungy glamour way. The animals you find in this kind of British neighborhood also felt very relevant to the fairytale atmosphere and changeling mythology.

At the same time, I had been reading a lot about people starting families in Spain, where I live. There was a lot of discussion in the press at the time about the fact that people were having their first baby at thirty-five or thirty-six. The birth rate is now 1.1 children per woman. Nobody’s having kids. Why not?

Of course, all of those conversations were happening alongside everything else going on in society: the fact that many people don’t have well-paying jobs, that they’re often living with their parents into their mid-thirties because they can’t afford to move out, the long tail of the financial crisis, gentrification, the arrival of Airbnb, and the transformation of neighborhoods. I felt that all of this was an essential part of the conversation.

Even though this isn’t a book about whether or not to have children, the reality is that we can afford the housing we can afford nowadays. Often, we’re able to afford it only because someone else has been pushed out by cost and can no longer live there. And even then, that housing might not be really fit for the purpose of raising a family. The broader drama of having children includes money, housing, the difficulty of reconciling the fact that everybody needs to work with the sky-high cost of childcare in so many countries. 

So I had all of these political questions floating around in my mind, and I wanted to address them in some way. I didn’t want a suburban, middle-class story of motherhood, even though Madeleine is, arguably, middle class.

You mention the changeling mythology – I am really curious about your research research process on this topic while writing the novel. Madeleine is doing a PhD in Victorian and Modernist literature and a lot of her research interests surface in the novel and are braided into the writing. 

I’m not an academic, but I decided to make Madeleine one because it gave her a reason to fixate on the idea of changelings. I thought, Why would someone think that? I knew changeling stories myself, but it’s not something that would have leapt into my mind. So that was my starting point, and from there it became a kind of self-reinforcing process.

I’m not as knowledgeable about the Modernists. I’ve always been a big fan of the Victorians, but the Modernists ended up making more sense for the novel. I always insist that I’m not actually an expert on the Victorians, the Modernists, or any of these subjects. It was more a case of making Madeleine an expert and then following her interests as I wrote.

The more I developed her character, the more I immersed myself in the material, especially modernist poetry. Then I’d go off on all these side tangents. I’d look for poems about babies, poems about animals, poems about cities, short stories and novels. I got a lot of books. Old books on Project Gutenberg, which is where some of the really bizarre Victorian novels come in. I downloaded PDFs of peculiar medieval stories, and it snowballed. 

I think, looking at the finished novel, it can seem as though everything was carefully planned. But in reality, a lot of it was extremely random.

One story that really chilled with me in the book was that of Bridget Cleary, the Irish woman who was murdered by her husband in 1895 after he claimed she had been abducted by fairies and replaced by a changeling. Did stories like hers shape your thinking as you wrote the novel? What do they reveal about how women—especially mothers and those experiencing mental illness—have been understood and treated throughout history?

One reason I was interested in changelings was that I came to see them as an early folk response to, if not depression, then at least a failure to bond. It’s finding your infant to be not your infant in some way. 

If that’s true, these experiences have existed throughout history. They’re not just a modern ill. 

Bridget Cleary wasn’t the one experiencing a mental health crisis. She had pneumonia or something similar, and her husband read a fairy explanation into it and  and murdered her. Nonetheless, Bridget shows how vulnerable women have been historically to storytelling. Sometimes that led to them being locked up or hospitalized, or living unhappily, or in the most extreme cases, killed.  

There’s a lot in Queen Mab around family lineage and our society’s obsession with blood connections or lack thereof. Why were you interested in exploring this theme in your writing?

I’m interested in migration a lot, or people with split identities. I myself am both British and Canadian. Madeleine is as well, although she has the opposite parent arrangement to me. I had a friend growing up who was adopted by two British parents, but was not eligible for a British passport because of being adopted, which was always a story that I found just so shocking. 

The more I thought about it, the more I became interested in adoption, both as yet another way of being a changeling, and another sort of potential source of alienation for Madeleine. 

There’s a beautiful moment in the novel too, where she does look at her connections with not her biological family, but her adoptive family, and sort of recognizes similar themes.

Yeah, I was very happy that the adoption thread allowed that to happen, because it did imply a more universal experience than just bad genes. 

Rose Bialer is an emerging translator and writer who lives in Barcelona. She has held positions at 826 Valencia, The Kenyon Review, Asymptote Journal, and Artist at Risk Connection. She holds a B.A. in Spanish and Sociology from Kenyon College and an MPhil in Comparative Literature from Trinity College Dublin.