Recently I was upsold a subscription to an ancestry website as I ordered chips online. Not exactly the obvious occasion for delving in to my, no doubt, rich historical tapestry, but this is where our obsession with our pasts and ourselves has led us, for better or worse.
I may not have noticed the strangeness of this offer had I not just finished Kate Davies’ Nuclear Family, which brings together the two central themes: DNA testing; and the dramas of a tight-knit family unit.
Davies’ sophomore novel begins with Lena buying her twin, Alison, and her father, Tom, DNA tests for Christmas, as no more than a bit of craic. She didn’t think too much more about it as she wrapped the boxes. Instead, she was looking forward to finding out what percentage French they might be. She wanted to know: is there anything unusual or exciting lurking in her biological past? However, this gift unearths a family secret: the twins are donor-conceived. And so unfolds a brilliant take on the family saga, drawing upon the zeitgeist debates around health data and sperm donation, particularly.
Parentage and the ramifications of knowing, or not, who we came from has a long history in literature: There’s the ambiguous heritage of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights for one. In 2010, poet and writer Jackie Kay wrote about tracing her biological parents in her memoir Red Dust Road.
Nuclear Family adds to this by complicating the narrative as donor-conceived Alison and her wife are in the process of using a sperm donor to conceive. The pain and the love shown in these scenes are beautiful as they persevere through rounds of IVF.
These examples of queer love are so sorely needed. Books like Nuclear Family are a gift to the new society being forged, one where queer families flourish in all their wonderful complexities. It’s all the more vital and necessary that this is not a syrupy, utopian narrative. It shows with tenderness and love the teething issues of getting through the IVF process. This follow-up novel to the Polari Book Prize-winning In at the Deep End is one of those rare books that strikes the right balance between “serious topic” and “a true joy to read”.
