How do you know who you are?

From mother-daughter relationships, to long-lost siblings, parental estrangement to jealous in-laws, there are rich seams of emotion to mine, and ever-changing landscapes to depict.

For Lucy Neave, it's the theme of connection, or lack thereof, that's at the forefront of her latest novel, Believe In Me. The disconnection that can grow and fester between a parent and child when things aren't talked about can shape an adult's entire life journey.

Set first in upstate New York in the United States, and then in Australia, Believe in Me is about Sarah, a young woman forced to leave her home in Poughkeepsie to travel to Idaho as a missionary in the 1970s. When she falls pregnant, she's dispatched to relatives in Sydney. The story is picked up by her now adult daughter Bet who, having no clear idea of what has led her mother to live the life she has, is faced with piecing together her own narrative, as a way of understanding Sarah's past.

"I think in families, there's often a lot of silence about things that happened, and that's also partly inspired me to write it," Neave says.

"But also, when you're a parent, that's the other side of it.

"You live this whole rich life before you had kids, but your kids actually have very little interest in it. But you've changed so much as a human being between the ages of, say, 18, and whenever you have kids, and you're a completely different person, really.

"There are just aspects of that existence that they don't have access to."

The book poses the important question of whether we can ever truly know or understand our parents' early lives, and whether we need to.

Neave, as it happens, doesn't know much about her extended families on either parent's side. Her father's father left the family early, and her mother lost both parents at a young age.

But while the book's blurb describes Believe in Me as a "deeply personal" novel, it bears little, if any, resemblance to her own life.

"I think it's personal on an emotional level, but not all that personal on an autobiographical level," she says.

She specifies that the disconnection the mother, Sarah, feels from her daughter is to do with distance, rather than death, and one that's exacerbated by the times. In the 1970s, distance made more of a difference, particularly one involving vast oceans.

Neave is no stranger to these kinds of distances, both in her writing and in her own life.

A lecturer in creative writing at the Australian National University, she published her first novel, Who We Were, in 2013. That book was a Cold War love story set in Melbourne and New York, revealing a geographical theme - as well as a narrative style - in common with her latest.

Australian-born, she has lived in various countries, and for the last several years in Canberra, with her husband and two children. But America is a place she keeps going back to. She first lived there as a Fulbright scholar and then as a lecturer in English, and most recently as a visiting scholar at New York University.

But her connection to the place is more than just professional.

"I've got really good friends there from graduate school," she says.

"And I work really hard in Canberra, I don't have many friends, I don't see many people outside of work in Canberra very much. But when I was on maternity leave, my friends were having babies at the same time, so I'd go over there and hang out with them a lot."

Spending the early months with her children there, where her friends have children the same age, made more sense than Canberra, where she has little family support.

And her connection to America goes back further than her stints living there as an adult. She remembers an early student exchange, and a particular train trip that made its way into the novel.

"I took Sarah's train trip basically, but luckily under very different circumstances," she says.

"I was 17, actually. I finished high school pretty young, and I went on an exchange and then my mum was going to Canada, so I caught the train by myself across from New York to Seattle, and then caught a bus over the border into Canada.

"Those were different times - you probably wouldn't do that to a 17-year-old these days."

She says she began work on this novel while still working on her first one; the early iteration had more of a veterinarian theme. Neave was a vet in an earlier segment of her life, having taken several years to finish her degree, and then spending two years in the profession before shifting to writing.

It's one of the book's main themes - animals, and caring for them. Foxes, dogs, horses, birds - all stand for something along the lines of companions, or symbols of success or failure. Bet trains to become a vet, and Sarah also focuses on caring for animals.

"In Believe in Me, there was [initially] a lot more about the vet stuff and that's actually how it started," she says.

"It was in some ways a way of me processing it because being a vet is quite traumatic, because you're often around animals dying and people who are upset."

But the early version of the story wasn't going anywhere. Once she introduced the character of the Sarah, and her relationship with Bet, it started to come together.

"I think what's interesting about being a vet, and also Sarah's experiences, is that when I was a vet in the country, the experience of being a gendered female, being a woman as a vet was not easy," she says.

"So I think there's that whole thing, in a way, about what being a woman's like, in all these different ways. Sarah has this terrible, traumatic experience, and then she has to make it as a single mother. I think there's a thread in relation to both of them, but they've come, in a way, out of a similar place, thinking about what it was like to be a woman in the 70s."

The novel also explores themes of identity through gender, another parallel with Neave's own life.

Bet is a solitary character, trying to understand her own narrative, as well as that of her mother. In the process, she experiments with her own sexuality, particularly through clothing.

"I think there are aspects of her in me," Neave says.

"I suppose I did draw a bit on autobiography for her because I did have a sort of cross-dressing phase...

"Bet sort of experiments and realises, I don't want to be a man. But I think there's a lot of claiming and staking out of identity now that I don't think existed in the early 2000s, and also she's not that interested in having a kind of really fixed identity in the way that a lot of people are now.

"So I think that's the other theme that I was sort of exploring in the book, because there are real benefits of defending an identity, of saying this is what I am, and that identity has a sort of political power, but there are risks too, because I think, in a way, you change so much over your lifetime."