Dear Debbie
Dear Debbie
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Freida McFadden on Dear Debbie
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
The injustice she never answeredThe book began with a feeling McFadden knows from her own life: absorbing a wrong and letting it go unanswered. She catalogued both the minor and the lasting versions of that experience before arriving at the question that became the novel.
Like everyone else, I have experienced frustrations in my life. The little ones like the driver who cuts me off in traffic or the people who leave their dog poop in the exact perfect place to step in it. Or the big ones that still keep me awake some nights. And what do I do when those injustices happen? Like the majority of people, I do nothing.
Debbie Mullen, an advice columnist in suburban Massachusetts who begins systematically reclaiming what was taken from her, is McFadden’s direct answer to that passivity. The cover reveal statement named her one of McFadden’s favorite protagonists across all of her thrillers.
That’s why I created Debbie Mullen. Debbie is the cool housewife slash advice columnist who has reached the end of her rope and finally starts taking back everything that was stolen from her – piece by piece, name by name. This book is a shout out to the silence that so many women live in every day. Debbie is one of my favorite protagonists of all my thrillers, and I hope you love her as much as I do.
Revenge is not a new territory for McFadden. Across more than two dozen books she has returned to it repeatedly, and she is frank about why it keeps pulling her back.
Those who have read most of my books know that revenge is a favourite topic for me.
With Debbie, she pushed that theme further than usual: not a single act of retaliation but a sustained, name-by-name campaign, and a protagonist she was willing to let readers love without letting them look away from what that love costs.
How she wrote it
Months in her head, weeks on the pageMcFadden’s process splits into two phases that look almost nothing alike. The first is invisible and slow; the second is a controlled sprint that leaves no room for ordinary life.
I spend a lot of time planning the book in my head and the physical writing is quick. I’ll think about a book for months and then I like to blow through the first draft really fast because once I’m writing, it’s all I can think about.
The sprint she describes is not a figure of speech. Once the draft begins, everything outside the manuscript gets set aside until the last page is done.
I write a first draft really quickly. I don’t like to do things halfway. I’m not the kind of person who can write a few hours a day and just be done with it. I completely immerse myself, and I don’t stop, ignore everything from life until I’m done.
Before any of that momentum builds, there is a quieter step: talking the seed of an idea out loud to someone who will push back. McFadden’s husband fills that role, and she credits the conversation itself, not the advice it produces, as the mechanism.
I often will toss things out with my husband. He’s my secret weapon. If I have a seed of an idea and I’m struggling with it, I’ll talk to him about it, and he’ll kind of spit ball things—he’ll make fun of me, usually, because he can’t help himself—but I think just the act of talking it out to somebody helps so much.
The personal thread
The high achiever who almost snappedWhen asked whether a Massachusetts housewife who turns calculating and dangerous shared anything with her creator, McFadden did not deflect. She located the connection in a specific kind of pressure she knows from her own history.
There are definitely parts of me in the character. When you’re a high achiever growing up, there’s a lot of pressure on you. I could imagine an alternative universe where I just get mad at everything and start to snap.
That personal recognition extended outward into something she sees as structural, not individual. The satisfaction of writing Debbie, she explained, came from the rarity of the outcome Debbie achieves.
I think a lot women go through that because in real life, it’s so rare to get justice in the way that you want. It’s like there’s nothing you can do. So there was something satisfying in writing about these feelings.
What she wants us to sit with
Rooting for someone you should questionMcFadden is precise about what fiction can do that real life routinely refuses to. The emotional payoff she designs into her books is not incidental to the story; it is the point.
It’s incredibly satisfying when fiction can deliver the happy ending that can elude us in our lives.
That satisfaction is complicated by design. McFadden has built her career on protagonists who sit outside easy moral categories, and she is explicit about why a clean hero would defeat her purpose.
I love writing morally grey characters. I’m intrigued by the idea that a person can be good deep down but still do bad things. Or a person can be mostly ‘evil’ yet still have sympathetic qualities. Someone who does nothing but good things is not interesting to read about, in my opinion!
Debbie is engineered to hold both of those pulls at once. McFadden wants readers to cheer the revenge and feel the weight of what it takes to carry it out. The discomfort, she implies, is exactly where the book does its work.