Queen Mab

In her debut novel *Queen Mab*, Canadian writer and editor Emily McBride tells the story of Madeline, a 23-year-old graduate student who has just become a new mother. She and her husband, Tom, are thrilled for their new arrival, but the excitement soon wears off when Madeline begins struggling with postpartum depression. Caring for her daughter feels unbearable as Maud cries incessantly and always seems to be hungry. As exhaustion and anxiety set in, Madeline begins to feel that something is not quite right and worries that her baby may have been stolen by a fairy and replaced with a changeling. For McBride, writing this novel was a deeply personal experience. At the time she was developing the manuscript, she also had a child of her own and shared many of the same challenges that her protagonist did. She reflected, "Although I didn't have anywhere near as extreme an experience as Madeline has in relation to the baby, there's no doubt that I had, in retrospect, postnatal depression... I think what I essentially had was failure to bond early on, and if you don't bond, the amount of work seems enormous for feelings that you are essentially not having... because I had been reading fairy tales, it occurred to me that changelings are some of the rare depictions of babies in literature, and they are a depiction which shows something wrong and some disconnect between what the baby appears to be and what the mother believes about it, and that was kind of the leaping off point for me of this whole story."

When discussing the underlying theme of adoption, McBride elaborated on why she felt the need to incorporate it in her story. "I wanted to explore Madeline's feeling about family. I wanted to explore, also, the experiences of women through the ages because I felt... that the changeling story was sort of an old way of talking about ambivalence... The adoption storyline allowed me to talk about family in the way that also allowed me to talk about all women because Madeline discovers things about her family, but they're not really her family and so it's larger than her, so because it was so focused on one person I wanted to expand the focus and make it a larger story that tells the story of many, many women."