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Melanie Cheng is a writer and general practitioner. She was born in Adelaide, grew up in Hong Kong and now lives in Melbourne. Her debut collection of short stories, Australia Day, won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript in 2016 and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction in 2018. Room for a Stranger, her highly acclaimed first novel, was published in 2019.
1. Why do you tell stories?
People tell stories, it’s what we do. The only difference is that I write mine down, and my reason for writing them down has changed over time. When I was younger, I was, as Saul Bellow says: a reader moved to emulation. I derived such immense joy from reading, I wanted to see if I could do that for readers too—it was like trying to understand a magic trick. But now, rather than a desire to emulate, I’m driven by a desire to harness my nebulous thoughts and feelings into something coherent—something that hints at a truth. Of course, this is an impossible task. I might come close sometimes, in a phrase or a sentence or a scene, and when I do, the satisfaction is druglike in its intoxication. And so I keep chasing that feeling, I keep trying, I keep writing.
2. Describe The Burrow in one or two sentence(s).
The Burrow tells the story of the Lee family, who are ravaged by grief following an unthinkable loss four years prior, and who, on the insistence of Lucie, their 10-year-old daughter, adopt a mini lop rabbit. The arrival of the pet, followed by an unexpected visit from Pauline, Lucie’s grandmother, force the family to confront the circumstances around the tragedy—their shame, their guilt and their willingness, or otherwise, to forgive each other and themselves.
3. This novel put me in mind somehow of Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space because the partly renovated house, the finished granny flat, and the rabbit hutch all become spaces, which reflect the shifting emotional states of the characters. Was it important for you to limit the stage where the story unfolds?
I’m ashamed to say I haven’t read The Poetics of Space—I really should!—but you are right in identifying my partiality to domestic settings. My first novel, Room for a Stranger, also takes place in a family home. I think it stems from my fascination with the high drama that occurs behind closed doors. My work as a general practitioner has gifted me wonderful insights into family dynamics and secrets and so I know that a writer doesn’t need an exotic setting for a great story. In fact, the family home can be a great pressure cooker for brewing tensions—as anyone who has ever attended a Christmas lunch will know!
4. I love the ways in which Melburnian writers, especially, are distilling the awful psychological and physical confines of the pandemic into their works of art, as you have done here in The Burrow. What implications does confinement and insulation have, or have had, on your three main characters, the father, mother and child?
So much is unspoken in a family—the resentment, the shame, the guilt, the worry, even the love. Under normal circumstances, people can avoid these feelings by escaping their relatives, and so they throw themselves into work or exercise or socialising, or less healthy things like substance abuse and gambling and unprotected sex. During the lockdowns, these mechanisms of escape were taken away from us in a very sudden and dramatic way. Couples and families were forced together again. And so it is with the Lee family. Jin can’t just hang around at work to avoid his sad daughter and even sadder wife. Amy, forced into home-schooling her 10-year-old, loses the peace and solitude of an empty house during the day. Lucie, who hates school, is perhaps the only one who benefits from the new arrangement but there are disadvantages for her too, including having to confront the severity of her mother’s grief and the growing tension between her parents.
5. The rabbit in this story is a beautiful conduit through which the characters begin to unravel and understand their separate burrows of grief. Did you always know that there would be an animal at the heart of this story, or did it come from getting to know the characters better?
For a long time, I had been playing with the idea of a family coming to terms with an accidental loss. I wanted to understand the blame and guilt that can arise in the wake of an impossible tragedy like that. But I wanted to write a hopeful book. I don’t enjoy reading stories that have no light, because that is not true to life. There is always light and shade—the balance is constantly shifting but one cannot exist without the other. And so for a while I didn’t know how to approach the book. And then the pandemic arrived and like so many others, my family took in a lockdown pet—only instead of a cat or a dog, we adopted a rabbit (my daughter has always been obsessed with bunnies and I thought it might be a bit less work!). And to my surprise, this tiny, watchful creature created a wonderful focus for our attention. I found myself wanting to write towards that. Thankfully around that same time, I was reading Charlotte Wood’s The Luminous Solution in which she talks about artists writing towards a heat, basically trusting their instinct, and so I decided not to question my impulse. And then once I began, it just felt right—there were so many layers, so many opportunities for symbolism. I saw that the rabbit not only mirrored the anxieties of the Lee family but reflected the way they were learning to read each other’s behaviours and movements. I had a lot of fun playing with that. And of course, bringing in all the knowledge I had gained from being a rabbit owner myself! Interesting facts like how a rabbit’s teeth never stop growing and how they eat their own poo!
6. What insights has your practice as novelist given to your medical work?
I love the way you have phrased this question because most of the time people ask me how my medical work informs my writing. I think to be a good writer you must first be a good observer. In medicine, there are time constraints and there is an impatience on the part of both the doctor and the patient to arrive at a diagnosis, to fix the problem. And so we rush in early with closed questions in an attempt to fit a patient and their symptoms into a ready-made diagnosis, when in fact a more efficient way would be to pause and take some time to observe and truly listen to a patient. I help out with the Narrative Medicine elective for medical students at the University of Melbourne and this is what we try to get the students to do through the act of creative writing.
7. The simplest stories are often the most penetrating and beautiful and I find this true of your work. Tell us about your editing process – how did you achieve the elegance of The Burrow where cultural, intergenerational & social differences are handled so effortlessly?
I’m a self-taught writer and I learnt the craft by writing short stories for literary journals and competitions. This meant that I was often writing within the constraints of a word count, and so I became a brutal editor. I’m always asking myself whether a word is pulling its weight—is it revealing character, is it serving the plot, is it important in establishing mood and setting? If not, then I will cut it, even if I really love the phrase or think it’s clever. The worst thing a writer can do, in my opinion, is to try and show off their cleverness on the page. Truth should be what we’re striving for, at least in literary fiction. I’ve also learnt to respect the reader. I try not to over-explain. I want the reader to be an active participant, to bridge the gap and bring their own knowledge and imagination to the reading experience. When a reader picks up a book, it should be a meeting of two minds.
8. When and where do you write?
When I became a published author I had a two-year-old and a five-year-old and I was working part-time as a GP and so I have never had long stretches of time in which to write. I write in 1-2 hour blocks when I can. Some weeks that may mean I get 6-8 hours done, but other weeks when there is illness or school commitments, I may only get an hour or two. And so it takes me a long time to write a novel and I write short novels! In terms of location, I find I am most productive in cafes or libraries where I can’t be distracted by household chores. I love background noise and a hot drink at hand.
9. What are three things that sustain you as an author, or while you’re writing?
I alluded to this in the previous question but coffee, or a hot drink of some kind, is absolutely essential. It’s almost Pavlovian now—I can’t write without a mug of tea of coffee at hand. The other thing is reading. When I feel stuck, I go to my bookshelf and pick up a book by an author I admire—Garner or Strout or Cusk and I read a few paragraphs to reset and reinspire me, to remind me of what I’m striving for. The third thing would be yoga. I only started doing yoga (using instructional YouTube videos) during lockdown as a way of de-stressing but I’ve kept it up. Now I find myself getting agitated if I haven’t done it. I do it in the morning as a way to start the day (on the weekends), or last thing in the evening to relax and stretch before bed (during the week).
10. Name three books that you couldn’t live without.
I find favourite lists almost impossible, so instead I’ve chosen three books that played a crucial role in my path to becoming a published author.
1. My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin. I read this when I was a teenager living in Hong Kong. The story could not have been further removed from my lived experience and yet I just loved Sybylla’s voice. It was also the first book I’d read about a young woman who wanted to be a writer. The seed was sown.
2. On Writing by Stephen King. I read this book at the perfect time—just as I was wondering how I might fit writing into my life. King taught me to write with the door closed and rewrite with the door open. He taught me to beware of adverbs. And he showed me how to find a space for writing and how to prioritise it.
3. The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas. I knew I wanted to write about Australia but I couldn’t write about the surf like Tim Winton or about rural historical Australia like Kate Grenville. And then I read The Slap and I recognised the Melbourne I knew and a whole world of possibility opened up before me. The success of that book showed me that Australian writers could write about suburban Australia, middle-class Australia, multicultural Australia, and people would want to read it.
What books were imperative to the writing of The Burrow?
There were two main literary influences. One was the children’s classic Watership Down —a childhood favourite of mine. In The Burrow, the book serves as a neutral meeting place for connection, particularly between Pauline and Lucie. I’ve since learnt that Richard Adams had trouble finding a publisher for Watership Down because the manuscript was felt to be too adult for children and too childlike for adults, and I think this reflects that in-between stage of childhood that Lucie finds herself in, as well as the very adult experiences she is being forced to grapple with as a child.
The other influence was Franz Kafka’s story, The Burrow, which I came across by chance when I was trying to decide on a title for the book. It was a wonderful serendipity. Kafka’s story is about an unnamed subterranean creature who is agonizing over the protection of his burrow. It is a stream of consciousness narrative in which the mole-like animal is torn between remaining in the comfortable and secure burrow where he lives, alone, and in constant fear of invasion, or leaving the burrow to face the perils of life. I knew immediately that I wanted my book to share a title with this story because the Lee family is facing the same dilemma as Kafka’s animal. Do they remain hidden from the world, battling their anxieties and their grief, or do they emerge from the security of their partially renovated home and face the world with all its perils, but also its opportunities for joy and freedom. The epigraph of The Burrow is taken from Kafka’s story: “The most beautiful thing about my burrow is the stillness. Of course, that is deceptive. At any moment it may be shattered and then all will be over”.