Novel ambition: When bad behaviour gets its own reward
She’s been telling stories one way or another for decades, and now Rachel Fox McLeod’s debut novel is simply Disgraceful.
Award-winning short story writer. Musician. Ghostwriter. Publicist. Screenwriter. Rachel Fox McLeod has been successfully telling stories of one kind or another for decades.
Recently, she added another title to the collection – novelist.
It was standing room only on the back deck of Avid Reader bookshop in West End earlier this month when Fox McLeod, 52, launched Disgraceful in conversation with friend and broadcaster Rebecca Levingston.
The book begins in the affluent suburbs of Sydney, and is told from the perspective of Grace, who is about to turn 50, and whose life is about to turn upside down. The book’s knockout tagline reads like a movie poster: “Sometimes bad decisions are the best ones you can make.” (More on the process of page-to-screen adaptation a bit later.)
In some ways, the long journey to the novel’s publication started during Fox McLeod’s time at Brisbane Powerhouse, where she worked as a publicist in the early 2010s. Commuting to work each day from the Gold Coast on the train, she would snatch moments to write the manuscript of an earlier book.
It was also during this period that she crossed paths with Brisbane writer Nick Earls, who read some of her work and encouraged her to stick with it.
That Fox McLeod would gravitate towards a career in storytelling is not surprising. She grew up in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, which is often referred to as “British Hollywood” for the large film and television studios that operate there. Her mother and grandmother ran the bar at the EMI Studios during the ’80s, while her father was a carpenter who built sets for iconic films.
“In the final year of middle school, you were allowed to go home for lunch instead of having school dinners,” Fox McLeod explains. “I’d just go down to the studios and Mum would give me lunch in the cafeteria … I have a very funny story about the Rolling Stones from one lunchtime. So it was crazy. We used to get to go on set all the time. Dad took us onto the set of
Labyrinth.”
The family had spent a stint in Australia previously, before returning to the UK. When Fox McLeod was 13, another opportunity presented itself. New production studios were opening on the Gold Coast,and her father was one of the original crew recruited to get the facility up and running. When she finished high school, Fox McLeod joined her dad on set, working as a labourer and art assistant.
In her early 20s, music and motherhood converged to take her journey in another direction. Fox McLeod wouldn’t focus on writing again until a decade later, when she decided to study at Griffith University. A successful internship at New Idea magazine led to work as an entertainment writer, but she chose to stay in Brisbane and landed the Powerhouse gig.
In 2011, her autobiographical tale Tryst won the Josephine Ulrick Prize – one of the nation’s most prestigious short story awards. That piece also received the Griffith Review Emerging Writer’s Prize. Fox McLeod married, and immersed herself in the world of film and television once again, this time as a screenwriter and teacher of screenwriting.
Disgraceful began life in 2021 as a concept for a television series and was conceived as Fox McLeod was navigating a divorce. The writer pitched the concept and received support from Screen Queensland to develop the script with an
experienced showrunner, and travel to the US to attend screenwriting conferences. But there was something missing.
“I was a prose writer first,” Fox McLeod clarifies. “The screen is so much sparser and it’s all very dialogue-driven and action-driven, and it’s what you can see on the page. There’s no interiority unless you’ve got interior monologue and voiceover and things like that … I’d hit a bit of a wall with Disgraceful the script, and I was just not feeling like I could dig deep – that what I was getting on the page was digging deep enough.”
‘I knew in order to finish it, I had to go really deep within myself and be really honest with myself’
While drafting the television episodes, Fox McLeod also wrote some sample chapters for Disgraceful the novel, but stashed them away for several years. The writer realised that to truly inhabit the mind of Grace, it required her to properly process some of her own experiences, and to have the time and distance to imagine what her protagonist would do next.
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“I knew in order to finish it, I had to go really deep within myself and be really honest with myself about a whole bunch of things,” Fox McLeod admits. “I knew if this book was going to be as good as I wanted it to be, I needed to really excavate all that stuff and put it on the page. And I was scared of people reading that. So there was a real element of fear.”
In 2024, following a transformational solo trip to Scotland where she hiked the Highlands, Fox McLeod felt ready to return to the novel. She asked her agent to show the chapters to an editor at publisher Simon & Schuster. A book deal was
quickly brokered, but there was a catch – she would need to finish the book in just four months.
Fox McLeod toiled away at her corporate writing job during the day, and worked on the manuscript until the early hours. Carving out some time at the Varuna writers’ retreat in the Blue Mountains was essential to meeting the deadline. Disgraceful follows its namesake as her carefully curated life begins to crumble.
“Grace has been married to a high-profile evangelist church leader for almost 30 years,” the author explains. “I won’t give any spoilers, but her marriage implodes unexpectedly. And she realises that she’s been the perfect wife, perfect mother, perfect role model. So she’s been on her best behaviour for literally 30 years, and now everything’s gone kaput. She’s had enough, so she decides to make 50 bad decisions before she turns 50.”
Fox McLeod’s background as a publicist was on display during the Brisbane book launch – goodie bags gifted to the audience had been scrawled in lipstick-red pen: “Be Disgraceful! Love Rachel x.”
With the book on shelves (and the audio version narrated by actor Annie Maynard), Fox McLeod is hopeful that Grace’s story will resonate with readers who are navigating their own question marks and cul-de-sacs.
“I want to reach women who have been through similar things – whether it be not feeling good enough, whether it be relationships, whether it be really struggling with motherhood. There’s a really strong theme through this book of finding motherhood very difficult, which was really important and hard.
“I wanted to write about things that we’re not supposed to talk about, and be far more honest than women are generally allowed to be.”
Grace is an invention, but she and Fox McLeod share some key experiences.
“In the book, Grace is told she’s going to become a grandmother and it just sends her into a tailspin. And that is 100 per cent true from my life,” the author admits.
At 45 and newly single, Fox McLeod was visiting New York to reboot and recharge when her daughter called at 1am with the news. In time, she learned to embrace her new role, and has dedicated the book to her daughter and granddaughters.
While some parts of the novel are designed to make the reader “snort laugh”, others are stark and sobering.
“It’s not literary fiction, but it’s not a beach read, either. It is very much in the middle between the two,” Fox McLeod says.
“Disgraceful is very funny, but it is also very dark.”
Disgraceful by Rachel Fox McLeod is published by Simon & Schuster. simonandschuster.com.au/books/Disgraceful/Rachel-Fox-McLeod/9781761634147
Books@Stones in Brisbane will host the author in conversation on May 21.
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