BUDDING NOVELISTS might not mind being compared to their more famous counterparts, but it's quite another thing when they not only beat you to publication with the same idea but use your title, too.
For Rosie Milne, novelist and South China Morning Post contributor, the pride at finishing her latest novel was tempered when she found out that British author Tony Parsons had written a similar-sounding novel - with the same title.
Parsons, in Hong Kong last year on a book tour, was asked about his as yet unfinished novel. Milne, sitting in the audience, groaned when he said it was called The Family Way and would focus on three women considering whether or not to have children. Milne had just finished her novel and sent it to her publishers as the second of a two-book deal. It was also called The Family Way, and focused on four sisters considering motherhood.
'His was due to be published in July - way before mine in January,' she says. 'He's a big author, so I changed the title.' Milne says she hasn't yet got around to reading Parson's book. And although she had to change the title - to Holding the Baby - she hasn't had to rework her story.
'Motherhood is something every single woman has to confront in one form or another,' Milne says. 'Even if the woman decides it's not for her. Men don't have to confront fatherhood in the same way. It's still a huge change to a woman's life in a way it isn't for men.'
Holding the Baby is set in London and New York, and examines the relationships and angst of a group of thirty-somethings, especially the pressures people face trying to juggle parenthood, marriage and careers. 'I'm looking at the issue of family in the modern world,' Milne says. 'How technology is allowed a place in reproduction, how marriage isn't necessarily linked to child-rearing, and how women in the west are allowed to take sexual pleasure if they want to. Nowadays, your family is whoever loves you. A family doesn't have to be one plus one and 2.4 children.'
Holding the Baby's characters include an infertile western couple who adopt a baby girl from China. Milne, an expatriate who has lived in Hong Kong for the past four years, says the inspiration for the couple came from friends, and that she couldn't have properly understood how they felt if she'd written the book in her native Britain.