From her home in regional New South Wales, Author Lauren McKellar tackles some tough topics under the cover of romantic fiction.
Growing up on the NSW Central Coast, author and journalist Lauren McKellar was practically born with printers’ ink in her veins. Her builder father and nurse mother were both avid readers and her grandparents ran a newsagency, where Lauren worked after school from about the age of 12. “I was surrounded by books and magazines,” she recalls. “One of the highlights of the week was going to our local bookstore with my dad. He would pick up his latest fix of horse racing thrillers — often by Dick Francis — and I’d get another dose of my favourite genre, which at the time was fantasy.”
Lauren grew into a “nerdy kind of teenager who went to a selective high school and did four-unit English for the HSC [Higher School Certificate]”, and found reading an escape from the usual angst of adolescence. Sadly, her father was diagnosed with cancer shortly before she finished year 12 in 2001 and died early the following year. “Although we both used to tease each other about our taste in books, privately we knew reading was a great pastime, whatever it was,” Lauren says. “I was so happy that before he passed, I managed to convince Dad to read The Lord of the Rings. And, of course, I was secretly reading whatever he had just finished.”
Once again, Lauren found solace in reading, though perhaps not as voraciously as before, as she navigated her way through a degree in music business management, a touring job with a schools’ theatre-in-education program and various gigs hosting speed dating, trivia nights and even crab racing. She returned to the Central Coast and landed the “only job in stand-up comedy management that wasn’t based in Sydney or Melbourne”. “I’d always wanted to write, but there was this nagging feeling that I wouldn’t be good enough to do it professionally,” she says. “I kind of drifted into reading women’s fiction, with authors such as Marian Keyes, Rachael Johns and Maggie Alderson. Then I saw this mat leave job as an editorial assistant with a niche publisher in Sydney and I applied. The man interviewing me said ‘You do realise, you’ll be out of a job in nine months?’ For some reason, I was emboldened to say ‘You’re all going to fall in love with me and not want to let me go’.”
Eighteen years down the track, Lauren’s day job is as managing editor of the publisher’s special projects division. After a few years working in magazines, she realised that she was, in fact, being paid to write, and this gave her the confidence to start writing her own material. “I started writing for young adults, because that was territory I knew well,” she says. “I heard about a challenge to write a novel in a month, so I signed up and decided to give it a go.” Lauren switched to her signature hyper-focus mode and assiduously devoted herself to crafting the requisite 1667 words a day to meet the 50,000-word target. With her similarly trademark candour, she describes the result as “categorically the world’s worst novel”. “The experience taught me two things,” she says. “It showed that I could do it, I could structure a story. And it also showed me that writing fiction was my true ambition and I had the passion to make it happen.”
She turned to writing with renewed commitment, carving out any window that would allow her to hit the keyboard. “I got up early to write, I wrote on the train, I wrote in my lunch break and just kept at it until I’d written a second novel, not brilliant, but better than the first. I sent it to a lot of agents and publishers and got a lot of rejections.”
She was halfway through her third novel in 2013, when she took a call from Harlequin Australia offering to digitally publish her ‘not-brilliant’ book, which was called Finding Home. “I was so gobsmacked I said to the publisher, Kate Cuthbert, ‘Are you sure you don’t want to think about it overnight?’ I just didn’t believe that someone important thought my work was worthy.”
However, it was just the impetus Lauren needed to knuckle down and write even more ferociously. Along the way, she did some structural editing courses, married her husband Pete Clarke — still finding time to knock out a few hundred words on the morning of their wedding – and delivered 15 more manuscripts, some published digitally through Harlequin and some self-published. “At the time it was financially better for me to self-publish,” she explains. “It was worth my while to write to market and follow trends.”
Lauren also picked up a side hustle editing manuscripts for other authors, particularly in the US. “One of them went quite well, so suddenly I was in demand from other authors to work on their work,” she says. “One of those books turned out to be quite adult in its content. I went from being this person who could barely say ‘penis’ without blushing, to someone who was quite comfortable handling erotic material.”
As inevitably happens, life began imitating art and Lauren found her work shifting to romance. In 2016, however, it all came to a grinding halt, when after years of trying unsuccessfully, she finally became pregnant. Following a complicated delivery, she and Pete became the proud parents of a boy, whom they named Airlie. “I had no idea what was wrong, but Airlie was a difficult baby,” she recalls. “Perhaps it had something to do with my milk supply because he was always hungry.”
Before that, however, Lauren found herself in a mothers’ group with “nothing more in common than the dates we’d had sex”. “I was in this room full of women with their babies cooing and gurgling and my beautiful baby thought the floor was lava,” she recalls. “He was constantly grizzling and the only way I could comfort him was to constantly hold him and alternately rock and jiggle him. He didn’t sleep and I was totally exhausted. “Something else I was struggling with after his birth was the feeling that there was something wrong with me because I was struggling with motherhood. Here we were with this baby that we both desperately wanted and yet I felt trapped and depressed and I wanted more. I wanted to be back at work.”
Lauren pulls no punches when describing the dark places this conflict took her to, even to the point of considering ending it all. “Fortunately, I was cognisant enough to realise this was not normal and I saw a psychologist,” she says. “I started exercising, I returned to writing and I started to feel better. Also, Airlie started eating solids, his sleep improved and so did mine.” When daughter Matilda came along in 2018, she was a dream-boat baby. But Lauren had also put strategies in place to help her cope in case that wasn’t the case. “I had a very clear plan that as soon as I came home from hospital, I was going to make time to write every day,” she says.
This time art imitated life, and Lauren chose a subject close to her heart. She began working on her latest novel, The Calendar Mums, which was recently released as her print debut and first solo novel for Harlequin. Her story focuses on a group of new mothers from a country town, not unlike her own — “there’s a bit of me in every character” — who band together to raise funds to save the local mothers’ group meeting place by posing nude for a calendar. While it would be easy to fi le Lauren’s take on this situation as kitchen-sink fiction, along the way, she addresses some very serious issues. Not the least of which is the precarity of access women in rural and regional areas have to community services such as postnatal care that their city sisters take for granted.
She also delves into post-natal inadequacy, anxiety and depression and the most troubling issues of all, coercive control and domestic violence. “It’s a sad statistic that one in three women is a victim of domestic violence (DV),” she says. “It’s also true that, for many women, leaving is not an option and that many women leave and are forced to go back to abusive relationships because they feel they have no other option. While I’ve never been in a physically abusive relationship, I was once in a relationship where I believe I was financially and emotionally abused and I wanted to draw attention to that as well.”
Lauren says she was drawn to the subject because she kept seeing posts in her local community women’s Facebook group from women pleading for nappies and other essential items they couldn’t afford to buy for their babies after fleeing a DV situation. “I reached out to the group asking them to talk to me anonymously about their experiences, and some of them generously responded,” she adds. “While part of me was thinking, ‘How can this be happening,’ the other part was realising that the only way out of it is to raise awareness and bring it to public attention.”
As life and motherhood got in the way, Lauren shelved her manuscript until after the birth of her younger son, Milo, who is turning five later this year. It was worth the wait, however, as The Calendar Mums is selling well in Australia and is about to be released in the Czech Republic and through Hodder & Stoughton in the UK and US. As the conversation progresses, it becomes very clear that Lauren has a lot on her plate. She still works full-time in magazine land, coaches authors, mentors emerging writers, manages her own writing schedule plus does the school drop-off s and pick-ups, not to mention a host of after-school activities and roles on community groups, sports clubs and the P&C. “I’m very fortunate that Pete works nights and weekends and I work days,” she says. “I’m my own worst enemy because I put my hand up for everything.”
When challenged, Lauren confesses she doesn’t sleep much and usually wakes for a “mental list-making hour” around 2am, when she itemises all the things she needs to do in the coming day. “I get up around five, write for an hour, get everything ready for the kids, take them to school, then come home and work until pick-up time,” she says. “Then I do kids’ stuff and dinner and usually write again after they’ve gone to bed. I’m lucky that both Pete and my mum are very supportive of this crazy routine. But it’s worth it because it allows me to write books like The Calendar Mums.”
Lauren says she’s well aware that not all domestic violence issues are resolved as neatly as they are in her book. “But I’m hopeful that it starts a few conversations and raises awareness about the challenges of parenthood, the most challenging and rewarding job we will ever take on,” she says. “I’m also proud that, at its core, the book is about women supporting each other. I’d actually gone quite a long way into my next novel when I realised that the protagonists weren’t doing that, so I’ve abandoned that for now and I’m starting again. At the end of the day, I’m only interested in writing books that my kids will be proud of when they grow up.
