Madeline Cash Plays By The Rules

For novelist Madeline Cash, a copywriting job at Jack in the Box was as educational as any MFA program could have been. “I would sometimes have to write 500 headlines over a weekend that somehow incorporated the food and the Super Bowl,” the Lost Lambs author tells Bustle. “It was very gamified, and I love writing puns. So there actually is a really clear pipeline from Jack in the Box to writing this book.”

Lost Lambs follows the Flynn sisters, a trio of increasingly unmoored adolescents navigating their parents’ unraveling marriage. Puns are literally everywhere — a local Italian spot called “Lucky Penne,” the Our Lady of Suffering’s Inner Beauty Pageant — but the style of structure they require was just as central to Cash’s writing process.

“I know there are some writers who go sit under an oak tree with a quill and just let it flow, but I really like restriction and formula. It actually leads to more creativity, having more confinement,” Cash says. The writer also drew a map, which she initially wanted to have printed inside the book à la Christopher Paolini’s Eragon. (Cash’s publisher didn’t share her vision.) “Because it was a fictional town I wanted to geographically have an idea of how many miles apart the church would be from Ms. Winkle’s house. What was the nice part of town? How far was it from the sea?”

The result of Cash’s self-imposed constraints is a bustling family novel that simmers with the same tensions and resentments found in the works of Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, and the great family novelists before her. Subscribing to that tradition, Cash says, ended up being the most freeing, creatively expansive choice she could make. “It’s a complete pendulum swing in the opposite direction [of my previous work],” says Cash, who wrote the short story collection Earth Angel. “There are no proper nouns in it. I was painstaking about not having characters use technology, or modernity being kept at bay in a way that could have made it more timeless.” Fewer options, infinite room to play.

On bookish New Year’s resolutions:

I made it my New Year’s resolution to read one page of every galley I get. It’s a writer's life’s work, so the least I can do is read one page. So I read Avigayl Sharp’s new book, Offseason, that’s coming out on Astra. I took it home over Christmas, and it is so smart, weird, and eerie.

On her emotional support object:

I have a rubber snake that I have to hold when I write. It’s a tactile thing. Someone got me a pack of them when I was a kid, and I played with them and my mom thought that it would stop... but it didn’t. I’m literally holding one right now.

On post-writing cigarettes:

In the past in Chinatown, I would go smoke a Turkish Royal cigarette on my fire escape and be like, “This is my town.” I used to be a raging alcoholic, honestly, and I really fancied myself part of the tradition of drinking at a bar while writing. But after two glasses of wine I couldn’t focus at all and just wanted to smoke a cigarette and call someone. I don’t drink anymore, and now that I have a little bit more financial leeway I’ll maybe go to a nice dinner.

On her plans to bequeath her writing desk:

I have this desk in my Chinatown apartment by Heywood Wakefield, who is this ’80s furniture designer of all wood pieces. Getting it up my fifth-floor walkup with no elevator involved two Serbian men coming over, and it took four hours. But it’s beautiful, and I love the desk and I will give it to my child.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.