Cash is a writer, editor, and cofounder of Forever literary magazine. Published when Cash was 29, Lost Lambs is the author’s debut novel and a conscious stylistic break from her earlier short story collection, Earth Angel (2023), which drew on her experiences growing up in the Internet era. In interviews, Cash has discussed her frustration with the tendency to pigeonhole female writers as primarily confessional, leaving the work of “serious” social critique the provenance of men (Nugent, Annabel. “How Lost Lambs Author Madeline Cash Became the Year’s Brightest Literary Star.” The Independent, 2026). With Lost Lambs, she specifically endeavored to write a “systems novel, a maximalist novel, a book that makes us examine our societal and political systems” (Ciabattari, Jane. “Madeline Cash on Writing an Absurdist Systems Novel.” Literary Hub, 2026). She hoped it would persuade readers to become more thoughtful and critical of the institutions that shape contemporary life: church, government, marriage, and family structures. There is a great deal of rebellion in the text, and the polyphonic structure draws attention to the way each central character is like a “lost lamb,” looking for something.

Although the novel does not draw heavily on Cash’s personal life—she has noted, for instance, that the small-town life the novel describes was somewhat foreign to her, having grown up in Los Angeles—Lost Lambs does reveal the impact of Cash’s professional experiences (Ciabattari). Cash attributes her fondness for wordplay (evidenced, for example, in the book’s recurring addition of a silent “g” to words) in part to a stint as a copywriter tasked with coming up with puns (Ciabattari). Another writing assignment functioned as partial inspiration for the human trafficking subplot: “The book’s villain, Paul Alabaster, was inspired by a real person who ritually transfuses his son’s blood to look younger [….]. Aside: I wrote an article about an island in the Mediterranean where billionaires go for FDA-unapproved gene therapy. The piece was killed” (Ciabattari). The book also owes something to Cash’s preferences as an editor; one interview describes the pieces published in Forever as united by a “cheeky tonal irreverence,” calling to mind Lost Lambs’ dark humor, absurdism, and genre-bending (Lent, Caitlin. “The Girls of Forever Magazine Have No Editorial Standards.” Interview, 2023).