Jacket Notes: Imagining another childhood

I started writing The Child during lockdown. A friend of mine invited me to join a writing group made up, mostly, of South Africans scattered across the world. It was a new Zoom meeting to add to my weekly calendar — along with the family catch-ups that I now miss, the remote pub quizzes with friends, the virtual check-ins to make sure we weren’t losing our minds — and I loved it. It reminded me of the workshops I attended during my creative writing master’s a few years before. And just like with the MFA, I quickly ran out of back catalogue work-in-progress stories. I needed to produce something new.

The Child started out as a series of scenes, some from my life and some imagined. I didn’t know what I was doing with it at first, blending memoir and fiction. I think it was a way of processing my anxiety about the pandemic and my grief about losing my father. I had written quite a few vignettes before I understood how they could fit together into something coherent.

Then I started researching. The adoption process. Police procedures. I broke out my trusty old cork board and started plotting. The plotting was easier than with my debut because there are fewer intersecting storylines, but it was not without its challenges. The protagonist of The Child is similar to me, but he isn’t me, and so keeping track of those differences required vigilance. How old would he have been in 1994? Did he finish at the same high school he started? What’s his sex life like? (His sex life has haunted me, with readers who assume it’s all me.)

I threw it all out and started again. With each new draft I found I was writing myself into a more hopeful outlook. I wanted the book to be raw and vulnerable, unflinching about male mental health, and how we heal from our childhoods and what we pass on to the next generation.

I wanted to look directly at the chasms we try to ignore in South African society. I also wanted to write about queer lives and relationships in a way that I don’t think has been done before in South Africa — everything from trauma and shame to love and joy. What it’s like to be a child, and a parent. What it’s like to be privileged, but damaged.

I’ve been surprised by how much readers adore Adrian, the husband character. I hope my real-life husband isn’t feeling too smug. I have a real-life pug, too, but it was his beloved predecessor who was the inspiration for Frasier in the novel. A pure manifestation of love.

I’m still no good at the “elevator pitch”. The novel’s about so many things. If I had to pick one line: It’s a story of how we find our way back to ourselves and those we love. Reading it is probably just as much of an emotional roller-coaster as writing it was, but for the readers, at least, it’s not messy and frustrating, and it’s much quicker to get to the hope! 

The Child by Alistair Mackay is published by Kwela.