Lost Lambs
Lost Lambs
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Madeline Cash on Lost Lambs
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Two books that became oneCash had just published ‘Earth Angel’, a story collection so closely mined from her own life that readers and critics treated it as autobiography. Her response was to swing as far from herself as she could get, and to make that distance into a formal rule.
Because of the influx of autofiction, I really had a pendulum-swing moment and didn’t want to do that at all. I decided almost as an exercise to write a complete work of fiction.
Refusing autobiography meant building an entire world from nothing — and that construction project clarified what kind of novel she was actually trying to write. She named her models precisely: ‘Something Happened’, ‘Underworld’, ‘Absalom, Absalom!’, and ‘The Corrections’.
I love, and endeavored to write, a systems novel, a maximalist novel, a book that makes us examine our societal or political systems.
When she pitched the manuscript, she compressed those ambitions into a single sentence: ‘The Corrections meets Eyes Wide Shut, which I think is funny and overly ambitious.’
The Alabaster subplot, in which a billionaire pursues biological immortality through a blood cult, began life as a separate book entirely. Cash had already researched a killed piece about an island where the ultra-wealthy travel for FDA-unapproved gene therapy, and the material needed somewhere to go.
The billionaire thing was actually going to be another book but then I started weaving them together — because I guess if corporate evil runs parallel to our lives anyway, it would make sense that it bumps up against this small town in some capacity.
Louise’s storyline, in which a teenage girl is radicalized by an online extremist group, came from an anxiety Cash carried from her own childhood — one she traces to growing up in the years immediately after September 11.
Growing up post-9/11, I was always scared of online terrorist recruiters for some reason. I don’t even think I knew what terrorism was.
How she wrote it
Post-its, spreadsheets, and a map the publisher rejectedCash had never written anything longer than ten pages before starting this novel. The structural problem was real, and she solved it before writing a word of prose.
I plotted it out with post-its on the wall and have several spreadsheets.
She also drew a physical map of the fictional town, tracking distances between the church, the school, and the harbor. She wanted it printed inside the book like the maps in fantasy novels. Her publisher said no.
The novel’s most distinctive surface feature, the silent ‘g’ inserted into every word containing the letters ‘n-a-t’ (‘gnatural’, ‘extermignation’, ‘dognation’), grew from the same rule that governed every other invented element. Cash set herself a constraint borrowed from Oulipo, the French literary school that argued restriction produces creativity: no proper nouns from the real world.
The initial rule of the book was to not use any proper nouns, so every place in the town and the world is fictionalised. It took a lot of world building, which is why I wanted to infest the text, as well as the town, with gnats. I wanted this feeling that something is not right to be with the reader persistently.
Her editor warned that readers would take the altered spellings for typos. Cash held firm. She still receives daily messages reporting errors.
The mystery plot required skills Cash didn’t yet have. She solved the problem the way she solved the structural one: by reading systematically before writing. The Irish Times puts the count at fourteen Golden Age detective novels.
I read detective noirs from the 1950s to understand the tone and plotting of a mystery, a genre I’d never written before.
Cash has no sisters and an absent father, so the Flynn family, at the novel’s center, required a level of calculation she compares to game design. Harper, the twelve-year-old polyglot conspiracy theorist who is the most linguistically sophisticated character in the book, cost the most research.
I made character charts. I made a Dan Harmon story circle. It was very calculated, giving everyone individuality. What are their wants? What do they need? What would they listen to? (I made playlists for certain characters.)
The novel was drafted entirely on evenings and weekends while Cash worked full-time as head copywriter for Jack in the Box, writing puns for fast-food campaigns from a 400-square-foot apartment in Chinatown. For the final push she took a week of leave and stayed at a relative’s apartment in Stuyvesant Town. Revisions happened at the DiTrapano Foundation’s ancestral home in Italy. The day the book deal came through, she quit.
By day I wrote about 100% beef patties and by night I wrote the book.
Cash’s default instinct under pressure is a joke. Her editors read that instinct as a structural problem, and pushed back during revision.
I was advised by my editors to balance the humor with the sentimental, which was a challenge — I tend to hide in humor, especially when uncomfortable — but this is more of a conversation for my therapist.
On what the book is wrestling with
Flocks, fools, and ordinary evilLouise’s radicalization by an online extremist group is the novel’s most overtly absurdist plot, but Cash frames it as the logical consequence of a universal need. The support group of the title, Lost Lambs, names the condition before the cure.
Everybody needs a flock. If there isn’t a flock, if your country doesn’t feel like your flock, or your family, your work, or your support group doesn’t feel like a flock, then your flock is gonna become an online terrorist group!
The novel is set inside a Catholic-adjacent church community, but Cash was careful not to let that setting do the work of moral sorting. Her own upbringing included Lutheran school through seventh grade, and she wrote from inside the culture rather than above it.
In Lost Lambs, the religious framework isn’t there to cast judgment or sort characters as righteous or evil. I’m not their moral arbiter. It’s there to illuminate how ordinary people fall short in recognizable ways. They want comfort, forgiveness, relief from pain.
Cash has said she was drawn to the ultra-wealthy not out of ideological contempt but out of curiosity about what money does to a person’s relationship with death. Paul Alabaster, the novel’s blood-cult billionaire, was modeled in part on Bryan Johnson, who funds transfusions of his teenage son’s blood in pursuit of biological age reversal.
I wasn’t fascinated with them ideologically... but psychologically. We all fear death but accept its inevitability, until we reach a certain income bracket and begin to question fate, rail against it, etc. I just think that’s interesting.
The comedy is not a softening of these concerns but the mechanism through which Cash thinks serious fiction can actually land. She invokes the figure of the court jester: the one person historically permitted to say true things to power.
Greater truths are often best articulated through humour. It is the jester’s privilege; the ability to speak truth to power under the guise of jest. The fool can make real change.
What she wants us to sit with
Recognition as the first stepEvery character in ‘Lost Lambs’ arrives pre-labeled: the church busybody, the devoted pastor, the absent father. Cash’s structural goal was to detonate those labels one by one, starting with the figure readers are most prepared to dismiss.
I wanted everyone to have a subversion of their stereotype. The church lady who’s supposed to be a nuisance ends up not only complex but also sexual, almost erotically spiritual, and the local pastor is into French cinema. I wanted every figure to undercut how they’re initially read.
Cash pointed to Lydia Millet’s ‘A Children’s Bible’ as the model she was reaching toward: a book in which children preserve something adults have surrendered. That optimism is the argument she wants the novel to make.
The highest compliment I could hope for is if people see themselves in these systems and feel driven to alter them.