5 Questions with Melanie Cheng
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Her debut collection of short stories, Australia Day, won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript in 2016 and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction in 2018.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.
No.1
Unlike your debut short story collection Australia Day (2017) and your debut novel Room For a Stranger (2019), The Burrow seems to hew closer to your life, especially as one of the protagonists, Amy, is also a medical doctor and author working on her second novel. What brought this about?
It’s often said that an author’s first book is their most autobiographical, and I think there is truth in that. I suspect the reason lies in the author’s fear that there will never be another book, and so they feel compelled to pack the first one with every idea they’ve ever had while at the same time going to great pains to disguise any reference to themselves. That’s what I did with Australia Day, and to a lesser extent, Room for a Stranger.
But by the third book, I understood that readers and reviewers were always going to look for the author in the book, and I no longer felt self-conscious about that. I was older, my skin was thicker and my friends and family had adjusted to having a writer in their lives. I love how authors like Rachel Cusk and more recently, Michelle de Kretser, taunt readers with this merging of fact and fiction. The Burrow sits much more squarely in the realm of fiction than Cusk’s books, but many of the details about the rabbit are drawn from my family’s experience with our pet mini-lop, Miles; and as you mentioned, I share Amy’s characteristics of being a writer and a mother, as well as Jin’s experience of being a doctor with Chinese heritage and Lucie’s qualities of being an introverted and bookish child. I hope this gives an authenticity and believability to these characters. It has the other advantage of requiring little to no additional research!
No.2
The Burrow is a slim novel at 185 pages. Many readers and critics have mentioned in recent times an uptick in smaller novels whether they may be called novellas or not. Did you set out with this length in mind, or did this result come after? Do you have any opinions on the novel versus the novella?
I’ve always loved reading novellas. Part of this may have to do with being time poor but I think mostly it has to do with my appreciation for the skill involved in producing a taut, restrained but emotionally dense piece of writing. Short books do appear to be having something of a moment, with internationally successful works by Max Porter and Claire Keegan, and most recently the Booker Prize-winning Orbital by Samantha Harvey. But novellas have always existed—obvious examples are Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In Australia, I’m a big fan of Mirandi Riwoe’s novellas, both for the quality of her prose and her commitment to subverting the literary canon. Novellas have more meat to them than a short story while avoiding the saggy middle that so many novels suffer from—they are the Goldilocks length for me.
No.3
The novel’s epigraph is from Kafka’s unfinished and posthumously-published short story of the same name (“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”). What resonances do you see between that story and yours?
I came across Kafka’s story, ‘The Burrow’, 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 agonising 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 resume his ‘comfortless life … which had no security whatever, but was one indiscriminate succession of perils’.
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?
No.4
What does your novel researching process look like?
I suppose my process is the reverse of some other authors. In the case of The Burrow, I researched caring for rabbits in anticipation of adopting one in real life, and then I used what I had learnt in the writing of the novel. Similarly, I became interested in the impact of sudden accidental loss on families as a result of my work in general practice. When it came to writing about such a family in The Burrow, I used my experience of caring for these families, and the insights gleaned from those doctor-patient encounters, to inform the work.
No.5
A sense of grief hums throughout The Burrow. What meaning did you think you found there?
The main question I wanted to address in The Burrow was: how does a family who have suffered an unthinkable tragedy, go on? How do they remain receptive to moments of joy and wonder after bearing witness to the random cruelty of the universe? Is it possible? And if it is, what does it look like? Jeanette Winterson describes grieving as ‘living with someone who is no longer there’ and this is true for the Lee family. Ruby looms so large because the surviving family members have made themselves so small. The Burrow tells the story of how each family member works to reclaim their space, not just within the family, but within the world at large—helped along by a small and watchful mini-lop rabbit.
Find out more
Amy, Jin and Lucie are leading isolated lives in their partially renovated, inner city home. They are not happy, but they are also terrified of change. When they buy a pet rabbit for Lucie, and then Amy’s mother, Pauline, comes to stay, the family is forced to confront long-buried secrets. Will opening their hearts to the rabbit help them to heal or only invite further tragedy?
The Burrow tells an unforgettable story about grief and hope. With her characteristic compassion and eye for detail, Melanie Cheng reveals the lives of others—even of a small rabbit.
Get it from Text Publishing here.