Madeline Docherty is a writer living in Glasgow. You can find her book reviews, personal essays and general musings on her Substack, one good egg.
Gender Theory, her incisive debut novel about illness, identity and how we care for those around us, was published in 2024.
Where did the inspiration for the novel come from?
There wasn’t a lightning strike of inspiration or a moment when I knew I wanted to write a novel. I wrote the first vignette of GT for a creative writing workshop after reading In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado and being impressed by her use of second person POV. And then I just kept writing vignettes! I actually think the first vignette works really well as a microcosm for the themes I deal with in the novel – sex, alienation from the body, searching for home, and female relationships – so I just kept exploring those things. After ten thousand words or so I emailed my tutor saying, do you think this could be a novel/novella? And she said yes. I felt like I had permission to start taking my work seriously after that.
The novel is written in second person, which I loved – it felt very immersive. It is a rarer point of view, though. Why this narrative choice?
As I said above, I loved In the Dream House, and I wanted to see if the use of second person would work well in a fiction piece. I loved writing in second person, it took me a while to get out of the habit after I finished GT. It works well for exploring a narrator who doesn’t feel at home in her body or mind; there’s a physicality and immediacy to the perspective that I think suited writing about pain and emotional turmoil. I also wanted the reader to feel close to the narrator and second person POV is great for making the reader feel complicit in the narrator’s thoughts and behaviour.
One of the main focuses thematically is the intensity of female friendship, which is made all the more complicated by the protagonist’s queerness. What drew you to write about this dynamic?
Women are often expected to fulfil many different roles in their relationships: mother, daughter, lover, carer etc. I wanted to understand how people get into these symbiotic relationships, and how it can be damaging for both participants long term. I also wanted to write a relationship that felt real and nuanced. In my experience, relationships are often fluid and therefore hard to define, especially with women, especially with young people, especially with newly-out queer folks.
I read your piece in Stylist about your experience living with chronic endometriosis. Why did you want to explore this illness through fiction, rather than, say, through essay or memoir?
At the moment, I am mostly uninterested in writing about myself. There are a few exceptions. I write quite personally on Substack to a very small audience, and I have a personal essay coming out with a small press soon, but overall, fiction is the medium I feel most comfortable with. I’m not brave enough to be honest in creative non-fiction and I feel like there’s no point in writing that isn’t truthful. The Stylist piece was strange. I’m glad I did it and my interview experience was positive, but I don’t think I would have talked about my experience of illness in such a public way if I wasn’t promoting the book. I used my own understanding of endometriosis to inform the narrator’s experience, but that’s where the similarities end – except for some logistical similarities regarding location, of course!
Like many young women writing realist literary fiction before you, you have received the inevitable Sally Rooney comparison. Do you find this flattering, or pigeon-holing?
I am a huge Sally Rooney fan, so I am incredibly flattered by any comparisons. I think she’s a beautiful writer, and I would be lying if I said she hadn’t been a big influence. However, I’ve read a few books recently by female writers that have been compared to Rooney and it turns out they’re stylistically and thematically completely different and the only similarity is the Irish connection or a brunette protagonist. It makes me think of the fact that every comic novel written by a woman seems to be heralded as ‘the new Bridget Jones’ or ‘the new Nora Ephron’. There are other writers!
Who are your literary inspirations, from Scotland and beyond?
It’s hard to answer this without feeling like I’m being too big for my boots and comparing myself with all these amazing authors. But at the moment I’m reading: Gwendoline Riley, Kiley Reid, JD Salinger, Laurie Colwin, Muriel Spark, Jean Rhys and Ernest Hemingway. I also name-check Edwin Morgan’s Strawberries in GT because I love it so much. It’s such a sexy poem.
What is the most valuable piece of advice you’ve been given about writing?
I do believe that you can’t be a writer without being a reader first. Developing a curious and engaged approach to reading is really the key to everything. Stephen King also has a lot of great advice in his book On Writing (which I recommend alongside the rest of the world). There’s a passage in that book that I’ll butcher here that’s about writing boldly instead of being afraid, and how timid writers are like timid lovers – passive. This is useful advice for me because I can be quite passive in my writing.
Are you working on any new projects now that Gender Theory is out in the world?
I am currently finishing up the first draft of my second book. I don’t want to say too much about it because I’ve been keeping my cards close to my chest with this one, but I can say that I’m proud of the writing I’ve been doing. With my debut, I had a lot of feedback while I was writing it. I wanted to see if I could do this one by myself.
I also don’t have a book deal for this one, so there’s no guarantee that it will be published, which is nerve wracking. I’ve found writing book two very difficult and it took me about a year of failed starts before I started working on this manuscript. I’m hoping I’ll be able to return to the projects I scrapped at some point and revive them – or at least strip them for parts – but yeah, sophomore syndrome is real.
Gender Theory was published by Hachette UK
Featured Photo Credits: Matthew Johnson
