Talk Vomit

By Monica Benevides

This spring, we reviewed Emily McBride’s debut novel Queen Mab, which comes out Aug. 4. The novel is entrenched in postpartum mental health, fairy folklore, and questions of how one continues to create against impenetrable forces. We’re sharing a Q&A with McBride, in which we tackle some of my very favorite subjects: horror stories, endings, and the viscous nature of the motherhood identity shift. Alright, maybe not my favorite subjects, but definitely subjects I spend a lot of time thinking about.

When I read Queen Mab, it was pretty clearly a horror story to me. Was that what you intended when you sat down to write it — did you always plan to write a horror novel?

This is such an interesting starting point because I am not really a horror reader and would not have thought I was writing a horror novel! I can’t handle anything too tense or scary and you wouldn’t find me in that section of the bookshop. That said, looking into which books are classified as horror, it turns out I’ve read quite a few, and many did influence me in one way or another. Shirley Jackson’s fraught female narrator in We Have Always Lived in the Castle is one, and Mariana Enriquez’s exploration of dark moments in history through ghosts and monsters in Things We Lost in the Fire another. I am re-evaluating my bookshelves now!

While writing Queen Mab though, the conversation I was mostly having with myself was whether it was a fantastical novel or a realist one. I didn’t want to fully come down on one side or the other, so by the end I was calling it “a realist novel with fairies.” I’ve always loved books that mostly follow the rules of the real world, but have a touch of magic or myth, or use symbols to talk about everyday dramas.

What drew you to the subject of maternal mental health and well-being?

When I had my first child, I expected to feel the rush of love everyone talks about. I hadn’t been a big baby person before, but it’s supposed to be different with your own. But for months, or even a year, I just felt quite neutral. And very sarcastic, because everyone kept telling me how happy I must be all the time. I felt like I must be missing the maternal gene. Five years later I was told I’d had post-natal depression.

The earliest writing of Queen Mab was not about a specific mental health problem, but just about that existential gap, having to rearrange your whole life, forever, for something you feel quite neutral about.

There is a lot of deeply unsettling lore around fairies. What made you decide to incorporate them into the novel?

I’ve always loved fairy stories and folktales but I was certainly no expert. But after becoming a mother I saw that changeling stories—the idea that fairies steal a human baby and leave one of their own in its place—were some of the only discussions of babies in literature that were actually about what the parent feels. I was looking for books that would explain my ambivalence, and at the time there wasn’t a lot, or not that I could find. But the changeling idea suddenly sprang out to me as a very direct case of mothers looking at their baby and thinking “what even is this?”

In terms of the writing, who came first, Madeleine or the fairy lore?

The fairies came first! It was a concept-driven novel at the beginning, or actually a short story that I wrote with a newborn sleeping balanced on my lap on one of those big doughnut cushions, because I had one of those babies that only sleeps on top of the mother.

There was always a mother-figure in the story, but she was more generic. I had fun turning her into Madeleine, with the starting point being that I wanted someone who studied literature and folktales, so she would have a reason for her madness spiral to take her where it does. And I gave her a lot of other problems to tip her over the edge more easily—being quite young, a mysterious reason for feeling isolated from her family, economic precarity which is a big reason the birth rate is collapsing around the world. I put her under a lot of stress from all directions. But I also wanted her to have good things in her life, so she’s quite imaginative, has a loving relationship and so on. In some ways she’s just your average PhD student, consumed with petty jealousies and job-market malaise…and it all gets absorbed into her madness.

The best horror stories, from my perspective, really poke at a sensitive societal nerve or collective fear entrenched in the real world. If you had to pin down Queen Mab’s central question or fear, what would you say it is?

On the motherhood side, I think it’s “what if I mess up the important things?” There aren’t so many areas of life where it really matters if we do a good job. Not everyone is career-driven, not everyone assigns value to the same things. But I think for most people who deliberately have a child, the idea of monumentally screwing it up is quite horrifying. But then many things are beyond your control, from your genes or hormones to the cost of living to the climate crisis. So there is that.

And more generally there’s just a fear of loss of control in the modern world. You work towards a job you love? It no longer pays enough to live on. You’d like to stay in your community? Rental prices have gone up 80% in a decade. You want to have a baby? Daycare is a second rent. I think it is not a fun time to just do the normal life things.

Something that’s particularly tricky in this novel is that Madeleine’s support system seems on the surface to be adequate. Her husband, for example, is not a cartoonish misogynist monster, and her peers from school seem to want to support her, although they don’t know how. What was it like threading those nuances?

The tricky thing about mental health is that, for all that we understand it better than we used to, it’s still invisible from the outside. I remember going for coffee with an acquaintance shortly after we’d each had a second child. We’d gone for lots of coffees with our first-borns, but this time she seemed bored with our conversation, and I left thinking she didn’t like me anymore. A month or two later she texted to say she’d been so depressed she almost killed herself. I had no idea that was the reason she was being odd, even though I’d been depressed myself and even though I was already writing this novel. It’s important to note that these things are not obvious, and even those who know us best can be misled because a mother isn’t getting much sleep, of course she’s cranky.

I wanted Madeleine’s husband to be a good person (though some readers hate him anyway!) because most of the fathers I know are doing their best and are up against the same problems of the modern world that the mothers are. I guess I just fundamentally believe that most people mean well, community is so important. But it’s also easy to fall out of it when you’re not strongly tied to a place or a job.

We’re not going to spoil the ending, so in lieu of that, I’d like to ask you more broadly: What, as both a reader and a writer, makes for a satisfying ending to a horror story? (Using horror as a catch-all for suspense/thriller/mystery/gothic etc.)

Again, I’m not totally sure I’m expert enough in these genres! But I think maybe the same as most writing—you want the story finished in some way, but not wrapped up so tight that there’s no air left. Maybe for horror specifically, you want the sense that the fear is still lurking somewhere, whether for your character specifically or in the world more generally, for all of us.

Can you tell us anything about where you’d like your writing to go next? Is there any element of Queen Mab you’d like to return to?

I’m working on a new novel and for a while I felt like it was the same thing, just transposed into a new situation. But they’ve diverged now, thankfully. It doesn’t have fairies, or babies. The repeating element, strangely enough, is spooky songs. In Queen Mab there are some eerie lullabies, and the new one has a whole subplot about murder ballads. So maybe you’re right that I write horror!