Orlaine McDonald and I meet at her home in southeast London on an outrageously gorgeous May morning. McDonald, who is 55 but looks not a day above 40, greets me with a big smile and a resonant voice that belies her petite five-foot stature. We sit in her sun-drenched livingroom, packed with plants, to chat about her debut novel, No Small Thing.
Now out in paperback, it won the Kate O’Brien Award and was shortlisted for the 2024 Nero Book Award for debut fiction and the RSL Ondaatje Prize. Its setting, based on the estate where McDonald lives – “extremely beautiful” in both spring and autumn – features as “almost a fifth character”, she tells me.
No Small Thing opens with a woman climbing to the top of a water tower and “taking flight”. We only find out which of the characters it is at the end – a narrative tension that keeps us turning the pages.
The arresting image, which seeded the idea of the novel, was based on a news story McDonald cut out years ago – “a tragic case of two young French girls who had a suicide pact”, she says, adding that her cousin took his own life when she was a teenager. “I just kept thinking, why? What led them to do that thing?”
The novel covers the year before the suicide. Michaela (“Mickey”), a young mother, has left her abusive partner, taking her 11-year-old daughter, Summer. With nowhere else to go, she returns to her own mother Livia’s home. Estranged for years, as Livia took off when Mickey was a child, the tensions between the three generations are beautifully rendered.
Livia is also visited by her own mother, Meriem, in the form of a ghostly voice. It’s an element that “draws deeply” on McDonald’s grief after losing her mother to ovarian cancer “far too young”. “It’s no small thing … to be a mother,” Meriem’s spirit tells her. “Or to lose one.”
Young motherhood is familiar terrain for McDonald. She had her first son at 19, and her daughter, the DJ Jamz Supernova, at 21; a third child followed with her second husband in her late 20s. “There’s a lot of teenage parenthood in my family,” says McDonald; her mother and sister were both 17 when they had their first babies. While it wasn’t always easy, she credits early motherhood for her ambition.
“I felt a really strong need to prove everybody wrong … always wanting to transcend that little working-class girl who had got herself up the duff.”
The women in the novel – with “skin tones from deepest cinnamon to buttermilk” – struggle with their identity, as McDonald did growing up. Among only a handful of kids of colour at school in England’s West Midlands region, she and her siblings “experienced quite a lot of racism”. With an Irish mother and a Jamaican father, both proud of their heritage, “it was very much instilled in me that we’re here but we’re not from here, and that was a bit confusing,” she says.
[ Aunts fictional and real matter more to us than they may knowOpens in new window ]
“The English were the baddies in my family history – the queen was bad, the empire was bad … But then here is where I live, and here is all I know.”
McDonald finally found a sense of belonging in youth theatre. Her father first sent her to drama to bring her out of her shell. “I was extremely shy … undersized … with big, thick glasses and a big afro. And I really struggled with my identity so just wanted to not be seen. And my dad rightly recognised that this isn’t going to pan out well for this kid.”
While they “weren’t a book-buying family”, her father “was kind of this aspirational figure that would turn up every now and then and bring us books that he wanted us to read about black history and bring us food that we might not have tasted before. I remember him bringing avocados. No one on my estate had ever eaten avocado, [or even] knew what an avocado was.”
After drama school, where McDonald met her ex-husband, the two founded a small theatre company together. They wrote “bits for that” and a play for young people that got commissioned by Half Moon Theatre in London. But it wasn’t until her 40s that she began writing in earnest – first as part of a writers’ group “just for the fun at our local bookshop, kind of dilly-dallying with short stories and poetry” and then more seriously in an MA in creative writing at Goldsmiths, University of London.
As a black writer, whether we do it to ourselves or whether or whether society asks it of us because of that underrepresentation, we do have that question that white writers wouldn’t have, which is, how am I portraying these characters?
— Orlaine McDonald
The MA, she says, was “an absolute game changer. It just blew my mind. Two years, one day a week, of being immersed in literature, writing, process, having access to writers who would come and talk to us, one-to-one tutorials, sharing work on a weekly basis. It was just everything I could’ve dreamed of.”
McDonald got divorced shortly after the MA, and writing was backburnered until she had the time and space to pick up the pen again. This is the “first time I’ve ever lived on my own and not been a carer,” she notes, “because I had caring duties from when I was very young.”
Alongside the theatre company, she worked in education, bringing drama to vulnerable kids and working as a learning mentor. She started writing No Small Thing in the mornings before her day job at the end of 2018, although “some of the characters were making themselves known” earlier. Then, when lockdown hit, with no social commitments outside of work, “it gave me this unadulterated time that I’d never had before”.
The chapters of No Small Thing alternate between the perspectives of Livia, Mickey, Summer and their upstairs neighbour, Earl. Earl watches the household with interest and befriends Summer. He’s drawn to them because he too has experienced what McDonald refers to as an “interruption to his mothering”: we flash back to a tragic police intervention in which he watches his mother die at the hands of the police after a false accusation of drug possession. Despite wanting to do better by Summer, Mickey’s own lack of mothering bears its scars, and she develops an alcohol problem.
In a literary landscape where black protagonists are woefully underrepresented, and working-class black women especially, I’m curious if McDonald was worried about portraying them as flawed characters.
“I asked myself the question a couple of times,” she says, “but I then just ignored it. I think, by then, these women were just so alive to me. As a black writer, whether we do it to ourselves or whether or whether society asks it of us because of that underrepresentation, we do have that question that white writers wouldn’t have, which is, how am I portraying these characters?
I hate those best-under-30 lists. I couldn’t have written this in my early 20s. I didn’t have the life experience
“And it annoys me that I had that question. It annoys me that I questioned it myself. But it very quickly became something [about which] I just thought, well, actually I’m not going to go down that road, I’m going to write very truthful characters.”
The book, I tell her, is all the stronger for it. “A lot of that is the people in my family, the people that I know, people in my friendship group,” McDonald says. “None of us are perfect, and that’s what makes us interesting and human, isn’t it, the contradictions?”
I ask if publishers’ diversity initiatives are succeeding at all. “It can always be better,” McDonald says. The attention it was given “after George Floyd and Black Lives Matter has tailed off, and I think that’s a real shame. It’s got to be in publishing that that changes because publishing is the gatekeeper of what people read.”
As with education, while there are people of colour in junior and support-staff roles, “the people in charge are white, middle-class people. So until it changes right up there … ” And while McDonald says she hasn’t experienced any ageism as a midlife debut novelist, “I hate those best-under-30 lists,” she admits. “I couldn’t have written [this] in my early 20s. I didn’t have the life experience.”
Before I head back out into the sunshine and McDonald goes to spend time with her three-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter, Forest (“the light of my life”), she lets me peek into her office. Like the rest of her home, the decor is cheery and colourful, with a turquoise wall, yellow couch and an orange-potted Chinese monkey plant. “I feel extremely lucky to have a room to write in,” she says.
A yellow shelf above her desk holds talismanic works, including books about writing, such as Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals and Jami Attenberg’s 1000 Words. I also spot Feel Free by Zadie Smith, whom McDonald counts as an inspiration along with writers including Diana Evans, Kit de Waal, Bernardine Evaristo and Anne Enright. Claire Killroy’s Soldier Sailor, her current read, which she’s finding “fantastic”, is on her desk.
[ Claire Kilroy: ‘I haven’t met one mother who didn’t talk about failure’Opens in new window ]
“I like short, punchy novels,” she says, citing Niamh Campbell’s This Happy and Natasha Brown’s Assembly as other examples.
McDonald is working on a new novel – “first draft vibes” – which is in the precious incubation stage, so too early to share the details for fear of jinxing it. A tiny cutting of the Chinese monkey plant sits on her desk in a little turquoise pot, like the seedling of her work-in-progress. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the acclaim that’s greeted No Small Thing, writing a second novel “feels a lot scarier,” she says. “[I’m] working very hard to try to take away the editing voice and just concentrate on the story.”
Above her desk are Post-it notes with quotations cheering her on. One, from the critic Maris Kreizman, reads: “So write the thing that you want to see in the world. You’re the only one who can.” It’s no small thing.
No Small Thing is published in paperback by Serpent’s Tail
