Image: Canva.
In Abbey Lay’s debut novel, Lead Us Not, the character at the centre of it all, Millie, lives the ordinary life of a middle-class teenage girl. She is ensconced in the familiarity and comfort of Australian suburbia—think beige weatherboards, new solar panels on tin roofs, vegetable beds lined up in neat rows. Her parents are loving but nondescript. Her school syllabus is easy enough for her to follow without any serious effort. She has the freedom of undisturbed days as an only child. But even amid this mindless humdrum of routine and recognition, Lay injects Millie’s life with the exhilarating frisson of the possibilities of impending adulthood, the feeling of being on the cusp of something:
I wanted to spend the rest of the day roaming, until the sun dripped over the streets like an omen. I wanted to find a new way home, to walk down a street I had never seen before, to discover a restaurant or a graffitied alleyway, fall in with a new crowd.
Millie’s school friend Olive moves in next door, and this instantaneously breathes life into her everyday. Olive’s presence renders the old new, transforms the mundane into the thrillingly unknown: ‘It’s like she turned up the saturation on everything.’
Lay injects Millie’s life with the exhilarating frisson of the possibilities of impending adulthood.
A feeling of obsession marks the friendship in Lead Us Not, complicated by the looming spectre of religion in the girls’ lives—the book’s title is a play on the Catholic prayer line ‘lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil’. Millie and Olive’s only class together is Religious Studies, but while Millie completed all her sacraments before she realised it was ‘pointless’, Olive grows up in a deeply religious family—a devotion she mirrors, much to Millie’s puzzlement. Overlooking each other’s bedroom windows, Millie spies on Olive constantly, taking in the details of her life from afar. Before long, she’s in Olive’s bedroom herself—role-playing as adults, speaking about sex with the naivety of youth and philosophising in a stilted manner as they converse in cloaked metaphors.
The emotional intensity and shifting sands of desire, envy and emulation never feel quite as acute as they do in tales of close female friendship. Such stories are manifold in the era-defining literature of our times. From the messy, thorny, conflicted relationship at the centre of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels to the fraught bond between friends/lovers in Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends—in their most famous iterations, they’re neither sanitised nor romanticised.
Left: My Brilliant Friend (2018). Right: Conversations with Friends (2022). Images: Imdb.com.
Australian literature isn’t without its own manifestations. Just as it did in Rooney’s breakout hit, the latent queerness of many female friendships comes to the fore in novels like Laura McPhee-Browne’s Cherry Beach (2020) and Diana Reid’s Love & Virtue (2021). More recently, Joanna Horton’s Between You and Me (2023) explores what critic Madeleine Gray describes as character triangulation, where ‘two young women, both of them queer or queer-adjacent’ have a bond that is ‘intensely connected and wavering between the platonic and the erotic’ and amplified by the ‘added complication of an older straight man, with whom one of the women sleeps’.
There is no older straight man in Lead Us Not, however—just Leon, the fumbling high school sweetheart of Millie, and Hunter, the debonair boy who Olive dates. These boys are, in many ways, incidental to the unfolding of Millie and Olive’s relationship—bit characters that are also the victims of cruelty, subject to a carelessness indicative of the violence teenagers often unleash on one another with nary a thought as to the consequences. Importantly, they are also a socially acceptable vessel through which the girls can express their thoughts about sex, desire and longing, skirting around the unacknowledged undercurrents coursing between them. At a pivotal juncture in the book, when compartmentalised feelings threaten to overspill into something raw and unfiltered, Millie models for Olive a black lingerie set she intends to wear for Leon; Olive’s voice ‘hitch[es] a little…as though she hadn’t spoken all day’ and Millie feels an awkwardness she can’t reconcile.
A feeling of obsession marks the friendship in Lead Us Not.
As Millie’s friendship with Olive gathers pace and intimacy, her parents—particularly her father—become more defined as people, the hazy ephemera enveloping them giving way to concrete details about their past, their dreams, their present preoccupations. Despite herself, Millie can’t help but start to see her parents as existing in complete separation to her, as having an entire life that preceded her—indicative in many ways of the rupturing between child and parent as the former ages into adulthood. There is turmoil in the domestic sphere—vague allusions are made to a difficult relationship between Millie’s mother and her grandmother—but a culture of silence pervades around grief, around bodies, around conflict: ‘The silence was passing down to me, like an inheritance. And the longer it lasted, the less I would do—could do—to break it.’
Lay expertly builds tension into the spaces in the book where these ambiguities sit. The opacity of Millie’s parents’ relationship troubles her but not enough for her to confront it head-on. Olive intimates that something is different about her parents, but she never says exactly what. There are delicately laid suspicions that Olive’s boyfriend is make-believe but he turns out to be stolid and real. Olive and Millie aren’t ever completely honest with one another—their inability to verbalise how they feel and the limitation of their teenage vocabularies to articulate what is going on between them are inhibitions inherited from their parents, their communities. Everyone is implicated in this culture of silence.
Similar to how we only ever see Hetty through Ness’s eyes in McPhee-Browne’s Cherry Beach, so it is the case with Olive and Millie. Olive is inscrutable in many ways to Millie, and in turn to us as the reader. So when an unspoken schism ruptures their relationship, Millie is besieged by a discombobulating grief so intense it affects her mood, her body, her studies, her other friendships. Grief is exacerbated by the sense of not knowing what has gone wrong.
Every event experienced for the first time in adolescence is heightened, lending the book an almost mythic quality. The pendulum swings between the throes of first love—‘I opened the curtains to allow the light to drench the white of my sheets, colouring them champagne’—and the acuity of heartbreak:
Looking out the window on the bus, it was as though the world itself had been sapped of colour. The sky was a bleached blue and the sun cast a meek light over the weatherboard houses, all of them beige, cream, duck egg.
What’s happening between Millie and Olive, and the reasons behind their cleaved relationship, are clear to the reader long before they ever become apparent to Millie herself. But they do become clear soon enough, and it’s all the sweeter when it happens.
Lead Us Not is our Debut Spotlight book for April. Find an interview with author Abbey Lay here.
Debut Spotlight is a paid partnership with Australian publishers designed to promote the critical discussion of new authors’ work to a wide audience. Titles are selected by KYD, and all reviews have editorial independence.
