Melanie Cheng's newest novel, The Burrow, stole an evening of my life. I was already a fan of her first two books, short story collection Austrainy Day and her first novel, Room for a Stranger. She's a terrific writer, and I was excited that she had a new book coming out. And The Burrow looked promising. Gorgeous cover, this large, implacable rabbit on the front, and a blurb that intrigued describing
the Melbourne based family jin Amy and Lucy. At the novel's core when, during the height of COVID lockdowns, they buy a pet rabbit for Lucy, and then Amy's mother, Pauline comes to stay. The family is forced to confront the tragedy of their shared past. Definitely one for the to read list, but it arrived in a week where I was utterly swamped, where the possibility of giving over to a good book felt tenuous. I had three other books jostling for my urgent attention emails to apply to
basic life maintenance beyond overdue. Melanie Chang and her latest foray into intimate familial insights and a Search for Connection was going to have to wait. But I had five minutes to spare between other things, waiting for a load of washing to finish its run, so I could hang it out. Not enough time to do anything substantial, but maybe just to perch on the arm of the couch and just skim the opening page, just for a minute. Then I blacked out and came to several hours later.
It was dark outside, the washing, sat unattended in the machine, and I just read a wonderful, engrossing novel. I'm Michael Williams, and this is Read This, the show about the books we love and the stories behind them. There's another reason beyond business that I was surprised that the Burrow managed to work such a spell on me. We began making read this just over a year ago, in July twenty
twenty three. It was a little over three years after the pandemic had begun, and just enough time for people to experience, process and begin reflecting on that life altering period of time. We were inundated with what can only be described as the COVID novel and by and Marge. I tended to avoid them like the plague. So why was this book an exception? Well? I do have something of a theory about that. See when she's not crafting delicate, richly drawn stories, Melanie cheng as a day job is
a practicing GP. I know, talk about overachiever, But not only does it mean that as a GP, she spends a lot of her day listening to people at their most vulnerable, they're most human. I think perhaps it meant that for Melanie chan a pandemic and its attendant losses and indignities offered a different kind of narrative potential. Before I even read my first Clovid novel, I already had
a sense of fatigue. You know, you go through those years and I think we came out the other side and we're like, oh my god, this is going to be every bit of culture from now on, every bit of pop culture whatever. And the Burrough might be the first time I've read something where placing it in that time and space feel so powerful and so moving and so evocative in ways that really enhance the core story
rather than add to a sense of cultural fatigue. And I'm curious about when you knew you wanted this to be a kind of lockdown novel.
Well, I'd had kind of general discussions with my agent even before you know, embarking on writing again, and she was telling me be.
Where the lockdown novel.
Publishers are not interested in it, and readers don't want.
To go there.
So I already had that in my head before i'd even kind of had the idea for the Burrow. I didn't have that intention initially, of course, but it was such a big part of my life as a working
GP and as a homeschooling mother. And the inspiration, of course for the novel came from my own pet, mini lock rabbit, which we took in as a lockdown pet, as so many other families did not in rabbits necessarily, but you know, something small and furry to get us through the bleak pandemic, and it just felt right to set it.
In that era.
Even though I knew that it might be a hard cell,
I think it is a great magnifier the pandemic. I tend to write stories set in domestic setting, small homes, because I feel there's a lot of drama in that, and it just added to the claustrophobia, the fear, and the uncertainty, and yeah, it made sense and you know, on some level, and this is something that I've realized later It wasn't part of my intention, but I think it is important that we document that time because while we don't want to revisit it now, because we have
this kind of almost collective PTSD about it, myself included, I think that in decades in the future, we will have forgotten what it was actually like on a day to day basis, and future generations might also want to know what it was like. I mean, we often think we'll remember, but you know, as time and time again, we'll show us we do be forget.
I think it's one of the things that shocked me, and most of all, I remember moments during lockdown, thinking this will change everything forever, you know, like we're not going back. This is going to fundamentally change the way we are as a society, the way we relate to each other. And the speed with which we reverted to type with which we tried to just pretend it hadn't happened, was like the entire project of global capitalism was just like,
oh no, I'm asserting myself again. I'm not remotely interested in thinking about the ways we relate to one another, the ways we commute, the ways we work, all of that stuff.
Yeah, very much so, I think that is the power of denial. I think a lot of us had that feeling early on in the pandemic that you know, there was almost.
A little bit of relief in.
Stopping and pausing and you know, reconnecting with our family. Initially, there was some joy in doing that. And then of course two years down the track.
I mean, you said your homeschooled a child, So anyone who homeschooled their child had a limited capacity to see the romance exactly, but at a thematic level, at a creative level, in the context of this book, the ways in which, as you say, has this kind of magnifying or heightening effect on a whole lot of themes and ideas that are incredibly resonant, regardless of pandemic or not, you know, around isolation, around intimacy, around both that combination
of claustrophobia and loneliness that can happen in families, you know, the ways in which those things play out.
Yeah, yeah, I mean even that denial is something that this family who are you know, ravaged by grief, are also in the film of denial and they haven't yet moved on, and so that also resonates you know, with the smaller story of the book set within this larger pandemic theme, and working as a health professional, you know, there was a great deal of fear and uncertainty and that I felt was reflected in this creature, which was a prey animal. And I think it was very important
that the pet was a prey animal. It's so different from a dog or a cat, which you know, we don't tend to think of as predators, but of course they are, and so they are allowed to relax in a way that you know, it was quite striking to me as the pet owner of a rabbit. I hadn't ever spent much time with rabbits before. How we would come across each other and he would bolt, and you know,
he was always alert. He doesn't even sleep with his eyes closed, and he only ever sleeps with very short interludes. And you know, that was a little bit like me during the pandemic. I didn't sleep for very long. I was in this heightened state of anxiety and awareness, and to have that mirrored in this animal was really interesting to me, and I did think this is something I'd like to explore.
His name was Mini.
His name's Miles, named after by my son after Miles Morales.
I don't want to move away from Miles just yet, because I am curious about the ways in which different kinds of pet ownership do change, You know they do. Are you in a pet person pre Miles?
Well, no, a bit like Jin, the character in the book. You know, I grew up in Hong Kong and apartments, and so we felt it was a little bit cruel to have pets. But I've always been quite fascinated with pet ownership. I've also kind of had some difficulties to reconcile with.
You know.
For instance, when we got Miles and adopted him, we were taking him away from his mom and his siblings, and I don't know how I completely felt about that. And he's a lone pet, and so it did feel like somewhat a selfish kind of act in some ways. And like rabbits are very interesting, and I think I convey this in the book that you know, they don't give you much, but when they do give you something, it's quite a you know, a bit of a dopamine kick.
It's like, you know, a hard to get lover or something, you know, like it's the pursuit of it that we love. But the other thing about I mean, I mentioned the prey animal side of things, but there was also this feeling that there was this unknowable quality two miles for me. You know, we're always joking that he's giving us the bombastic side eye. We don't really know what he's thinking
or what he's feeling. I mean that rabbits do this glorious thing called a binkie, which is a little leap in the air, and halfway through they kind of twist and once you've seen it, it's really delightful, and that is when you know they're happy. But that is very few and far between, so in between times we're really left guessing. And again, in terms of the themes of
the novel, that tied in quite beautifully. I think because we've got these four characters living in the house, they're not really talking about the real issues with each other. They're kind of trying to interpret each other's behaviors and movements. There's this intense, you know, unknowable quality between them. So I love that we might think that, you know, human beings are more accessible to each other than animals are to humans, but there is a core in all of us which is unknowable.
Yeah.
Absolutely, and particularly as the book lays out, particularly in crisis, there is a thing about grief and a family or any unit of people struck by a tragedy where everyone's affected differently and everyone's having to cope in different ways. That can mean closing off to one another.
Yes, very much so.
I mean the issue here was the circumstances of the death is accidental, unexpected, and so many of us go through life with the delusion that tomorrow will be like yesterday, or next week will be largely like you know, this week.
And we have to to some degree believe that, because why would we continue doing half the things we're doing but for those people, And you know, I've had first hand experience dealing with families through my work or friends that have gone through that kind of sudden, unexpected, accidental death, and it is rocking. I remember a friend of mine saying she didn't trust the universe anymore.
And so they.
Also are not, as I discussed in the book, a religious family, and then are in a family of faith. They are very much a kind of family based in science, belief, and cause and effect. And so when an accident happens, what they tend to do in the aftermath that this family and gene is to look back and think, what
could I have done differently? And there's a lot of shame in that, a lot of guilt in that, And that is what they're brewing in in these years after their loss, their own guilt, and they don't want to disclose it for fear of what that might mean.
And also the difficulty of responsibility to others, like that sheer impossibility of being a parent while grappling with your own shame, guilt, grief, that thing about the need to have that kind of care for others and to be there for others and to be reliable to others. That absolutely stifles your character's capacity, but human beings capacity to go through their own process of grieving.
Yeah, and we see, you know, for instance, Jin revert to some of this what I call magical thinking that he had as as a child, like superstitious thinking that if you do this, you somehow have some control over the future. And similarly, you know, Lucy does retreat to
prayer and Amy gets quite angry about that. And I think, you know, that was important to me because I've always felt a little bit envious of people of faith and people of you know, religion, because if you believe in cause and effect and you're very scientific, then it comes with this huge burden of responsibility as well, because you then the implications are that every behavior, every action has untop or unforeseen consequences, and that really comes into play
when an accident happens. And that's that's a huge burden really to bear, and that's what we're seeing in this family. And so in order to try and alleviate themselves of that, they start to look to prayer or they look to more superstitious thinking. And I think we all do that on some level. There's a huge contradiction even in myself and a lot of the ways I behave.
Are you superstitious?
Yes, I would say so. I'm I'm admitting it.
Now I might not have because.
Who wants a superstitious doctor?
Right?
But I think I do.
What a superstitious doctor? What a doctor that's like, well, you've done everything right, but now I'm gonna tap this three times so they kind of walk around the building or whatever. I'm okay with that.
Okay, Well that's good. Yeah.
Well I think you know, as a child, I was quite superstitious, and you know, you could argue that a lot of the things that we do attached to faith are a kind of form of superstition or a type of way of regaining control over the uncontrollable. And so so yeah, that's what I was trying to achieve.
After the break, Melanie shares the details of her own life that inspired the Burrow And have you ever heard of narrative medicine? I hadn't. That it's crucial for understanding this book. We'll be right back. Grandmothers are a recurring thing in your work generally. You're clearly interested in grandmothers as narrative engines and as a particular type of human being. What is it about.
Grandma's Well, I only had one grandmother growing up. So my mother's mother died when she was very young, at four years of age. And I think that's as it had its own impact on me and maybe even plays into this book. But my other grandmother was my Chinese grandmother, who I was actually named after, So my Chinese name,
so Lyn, is actually her name. But I could not communicate with her because I don't speak Chinese and she didn't speak English, and so it was a lot of mystery associated with our relationship, and I wrote about that in a short story included in my collection Australia Day.
And Now.
Of course, I have my own children and they have two grandmothers, and I think it's quite a unique and special relationship there. Even in the book I took about the distance of the generation allowing something quite fresh and new.
It's very different from parenting. Now, even having friends that are embarking on that relationship with their own grandchildren, they talk about, you know, how magical it is, how often he it is, because it's kind of all of the fun stuff about parenting without as much of the day to day tedium of it.
That distance and closeness locked up together is such an important part of it. And it does strike me that grandparents in migrant families there's a particularly interesting thing at play, which is the kind of gulf in lived experience. So those challenges of communication, of kind of sharing a worldview or reality are kind of heightened by both generational divide and then place of living, geographical context, all of that stuff.
Yeah, very much so, And so we didn't mention the Lucy's other pair of grandparents, who are exactly that you know their Jin's parents, and there is this huge kind of golf between them. They do speak English, but kind
of haltingly and culturally they're quite separated. And in the book we talk about the gifts that they buy not being you know, so welcomed by Lucy because they're often either judged to be too simple for her, or the clothes are too big because they're trying to get a lot of wear out of them, And Jin expresses some jealousy about how Lucy has a closer relationship with Pauline, who's Amy's mother in the book.
Yeah, Pauline is such a wonderful character. I do love her.
Yeah, I love her too.
You mentioned before your debut was a book of short stories called Australia Day. But I'm curious since then, you've written two novels, and they are both beautiful in many ways. I would say, delicate novels that take the kind of energy of a really wonderful short story and work out how to render it deeper and more complex. I'm curious about whether that's a deliberate trajectory. Have you moved away from the short story or are these boundaries fluid?
I think you know when I started writing, I mistakenly thought short stories were easier to write, which, of course, as anyone who writes short stories, it's not true. They're different from the point of view of time, though they are easier to complete, and so that was good for me when I had another job. But I came to love the form. And the reason I love the form is sometimes the same reasons that people find short stories difficult, which is that they.
Demand more of the reader.
They expect the reader to rise up to the challenge, fell in a lot of gaps with their own imagination, and so that's hard if you're used to reading novels where everything is tied up really neatly. But once you kind of get hooked on that, then you resent reading novels that tell you everything because you like to be respected as a reader and so and I enjoy that, and so I think I have taken that forward into writing longer form.
And I don't write very long forms. You know.
My two books are short novels. But that's because I'm just a ruthless editor. And that is what happened with my apprenticeship through short story writing. And I love the quote from Tony Morrison that it's often what you don't write that gives what you do write its power. And I do a narrative medicine course at Melbourne Union and a student there recently talked about the negative spaces and short stories, which.
I really love as well.
So yeah, I've brought that across to the novels and I think that's how I'm going to practice going forward.
Can you talk about the relationship for you between medicine and writing.
Yeah, I find them to be quite complimentary, and I think that maybe to do with me practicing in general practice rather than maybe surgery per se. But every day when I go to work and I sit down and I call someone into the room, the first thing that happens is that they.
Tell me a story, the story of their illness.
And a great supervisor I had in general practice a long time ago told me, look to spend some moments one day when you're not working, sitting in a medical waiting room and just imagine what those people are doing as they sit there. They are practicing what they're going to say when they sit in the chair. And of course that's true, and I've done it myself when I go to a GP practice. So words are really important, so they tell us. And that's what narrative medicine is about.
It's about the patient's story meeting the doctor's story and creating something entirely new. But yeah, I've always found it to be, you know, an inspiration. I don't write about specific patients, you know, I write in the fictional space, but of.
Course I draw on the insights that I gain.
You know, I don't live an extraordinarily interesting life, but through my work I get to see into a lot of different lives and different experiences. And yeah, I've always brought that into my writing. It's been a privilege. But for a great source of inspiration for the writing.
Well, it seems to me that you're on a daily basis seeing people at their most tender and the most vulnerable, you know, the people who are scared, people who are anxious, people who are you in pain, and that must give a particular impression of the human condition.
I guess yes, And I have to remind myself sometimes that, you know, the people that are presenting to general practice are not the wider population in general. That is, when they're at their most vulnerable or unwell. But I've also had the experience where people tell me things that they
said they've never told anyone else. So as a writer, that is wonderful because most of all, it's validating because I think there have been things that I've thought, or dark thoughts that I've had that then I see reflected in patients and I realize that's quite common and normal, and I can reassure them also through that process.
What do you want for characters like the characters in the Burrows when you're writing, what's the relationship there?
I think I am interested in complexity. I really am not interested in heroes and villains in good and bad people, because I have seen people through work who have done awful things, but I've seen them as a person, and I've seen them in a vulnerable state, and it's hard to hate that person, and it's hard to reduce them to this awful act that they've done.
It's actually scary.
And maybe that's why people like to keep these hero villain categories, because once you start to see the human element of these awful acts, then it's confronting for you as a fellow human being in that maybe you would be capable of doing some of these, you know, terrible things.
Also, it's a weird thing that desire for empathy when we read that desire to feel like, as you say, there's a hero we can cheer for, or we can feel a little less shabby or lost ourselves.
Yeah.
Well, I kind of like reading vulnerable characters because again, it makes me feel less alone in my vulnerability. So that's the impulse.
One of the things that comes through again and again is that the nature of grief is it can be so inarticulate, you know, it can be so the impossibility of finding words that are kind of sufficient for it. And our relationship with animals relies on a kind of inarticulate relationship, a kind of trust and I love and then a family relies on an ability to understand one
another or to talk to one another. And so part of what I love so much about The Barrows is it comes in the intersection of all those ideas that there are some things that are impossible to put to words, but there is a fundamental need to find a way to do so you're a family unit.
Yeah, And I think, without giving too much away of the in the book, you know, ultimately the family finds salvation in opening up and actually saying those difficult words to each other and actually articulating the guilt that they're all nursing around what happened. And that's another thing I think that I've learned through speaking to so many patients through general practice, is that so much of tragedy is
actually in the unspoken. You know, I might see various family members from the same family and you just wish that they would talk to one another. And another thing I think I've learned is that intimacy comes from being emotionally vulnerable with each other.
It's scared to make the first step, especially because.
You don't know, I mean, making yourself vulnerable was always scary, and you don't know how the other person's going to react. But when an accident like this looms so large over a household, like for the Lee family, their healing can only really come once they let it all out in the open.
I think, Yeah, I don't think it constitutes a spoiler to tell your prospective readers that they don't have to be scared of this book. But there is a book that is very much about love and tenderness and about kind of finding a way to one another through an impossible situation.
Yeah, And I recently read in the introduction to George Saunders tenth of December an interview with him where he talks about being on a flight from Chicago to Syracuse and it was a terrible flight. They flew into a flock of geese and for a moment they all believed that they would die. And George Saunders talks about for the three or four days after that that the world
was the most beautiful place. Everything was suddenly imbued with this meaning, and he talks about that being the trick that if we could just maintain that, you know, that sense. But it only lasted three to four days, even for George Saunders, you see. So if there can be any silver lining to this kind of awful tragedy that happens to a family like that in the Burrow, it is that, you know, maybe it can bring that kind of meaning, gratitude you don't take things for granted.
Well, the other comfort that comes out of it is if stories like that can create wonderful and enduring works of literature. And I have no doubt that's what's happened here. And I'm so excited for people to get to read this astonishing and beautiful book. Thank you for coming in.
Thank you so much, Michael, It means so much. Thank you.
Melanie Cheng's beautiful novel The Burrow is available at all good bookstores now. Before we go, I wanted to tell you what I've been reading this week, and as I flagged last week, like so much of the rest of the English language world, I've been reading the new Sally Rooney. I'm not yet finished, but I need to say something. People need to shut up. Some weird backlash happens when an artist and their work are hyped, and, as is so often the case, so little of it has anything
to do with the art in question. I am having the best time in Rooney's very capable hands. She's funny, smart, so skilled at building well realized characters, grappling with very real dilemmas and crises. She writes sex well story well. She is the real deal. The book is called Intermezzo, and I encourage you to read it on its own terms. I think it's very good. You can find it and a whole lot of other books that aren't by Sally Rooney at your favorite independent bookstore. That's it for this
week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends and rate and review us. It helps a lot. Next week I'm read this. I'm going to be joined in the studio by one of Australia's best chefs, the owner of Melbourne institution, Attica ben Shuri. His intimate new novel Uses for Obsession is a modern classic of the genre. Read This is produced and edited by Clara Ames. The show is mixed by Travis Evans with original compositions by Zolden Fetcher. Thanks for listening and see you next week.