The Housemaid
The Housemaid
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Freida McFadden on The Housemaid
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A creepy attic and one cringe-worthy sceneThe book began not with a character or a plot, but with a single moment in someone else’s novel. That moment lodged in her mind as something worth expanding: one beat of workplace power imbalance, and she wanted to see what happened if you built an entire story around it.
I read another book where an employer was a bit snippy to her maid in one scene, and I enjoyed that one scene so much, I thought to myself, ‘This should be a whole book!’
Before she was a novelist, she had absorbed this dynamic from the inside. Years of working for a difficult employer gave her something more than a concept. She had the memory of what it actually felt like to absorb that treatment, and she had a specific word for what she wanted readers to feel alongside her protagonist.
I sort of like the idea of an employee being treated poorly, because I’ve kind of been in that situation before, not recently, but years ago. And I also like situations where they’re just very cringey, because somebody’s sort of being treated so badly. I love the cringe. [paraphrased from audio]
The setting came from a house she had lived in. When she visited the film set decades after moving out, she pointed directly to a single architectural feature as the origin of Millie’s living quarters.
In my old house where I used to live, it’s just a very old Boston house, like from the 19th century, and I had this super creepy attic. So I was kind of obsessed with like this attic. And I needed to write an attic story about something bad happening in an attic. If you saw that attic, you would totally understand the whole book. [paraphrased from audio]
Even after writing it, she had low confidence in the manuscript. She kept it off her publishing schedule not out of strategy but out of genuine doubt. When Bookouture eventually approached her, she set her expectations at a few thousand additional readers, nothing more.
First of all, I wasn’t going to publish it at all. I wrote it, and I didn’t think it was the greatest thing I’d ever written. So I kept pushing it to the back of like the publishing queue. [paraphrased from audio]
That hesitation makes the book’s trajectory stranger in retrospect. The manuscript she nearly buried went on to become the basis for a major Hollywood film starring Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried.
How she wrote it
All in her head, until the words came outHer planning happens entirely without notes. She had been developing stories mentally for years before she ever opened a document, and she was aware that readers sometimes mistook her twists for improvisation. The reality was the opposite.
I plot out stories in my head. Sometimes I’ll see people say online, oh, she just came up with this at the last second this twist. No, I never do that. It’s all in my head, and I usually plan it out for a few months before I write even a word. [paraphrased from audio]
Once she sat down to write, the story refused to stay within her usual limits. Her standard first drafts ran to around 60,000 words. This one kept going past that point with no end in sight, and she had to reckon mid-draft with the fact that she had more story than she had planned for.
This one surprised me by how long the first draft was. Usually my first drafts run around 60,000 words, and there was a point when I was writing it where I was like, ‘Oh no! I’ve written so much, and I still have so much more to say!’ Thankfully, people still think it’s a very quick read.
The voice readers describe as fast and conversational is not a stylistic calculation. It comes directly from her physical method of composition: she speaks her drafts aloud rather than typing them, which means the rhythm of speech is baked into every sentence from the first pass.
I actually dictate a lot of my writing. So I think that’s why it sounds very conversational. It’s literally me talking.
One of the central structural decisions was about withholding alignment. She wanted readers to feel genuinely unsure which character carried the moral weight of villainy, which meant resisting the thriller convention of a clear protagonist-versus-antagonist frame from the start.
I didn’t want, you know, either the housemaid or the couple really to be the intolerable one. I sort of wanted it to be uncertain, like who really is the person who is bad. Like, I like to sort of play with people’s expectations about that. [paraphrased from audio]
Her editor at Bookouture, Ellen Gleeson, arrived during revision, and the fit turned out to matter more than McFadden had expected. Most editorial relationships had not given her this particular experience of being read with precision.
My Bookouture editor, Ellen Gleeson, surprised me by how well she ‘got’ my book. I’ve worked with a lot of beta readers and editors over the years, but she really was able to pinpoint the problem areas, which helped me to fix them.
On what the book is wrestling with
The ledger that real life never settlesHer blueprint for the thriller form comes from two books she treats as anchors of the genre. She named them in order and drew a line between the original and the revival, with a specific argument about which one remade the category she works in.
The first one that comes to mind is Gone Girl [by Gillian Flynn]. It’s the origin of the modern domestic thriller. Like, Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier was the OG, but Gone Girl brought it back. Everybody got in on it, and it recreated the genre I love.
She has a precise formula for what makes a reveal land rather than frustrate. It is not simply about the least-suspected character. The criterion is stranger and more demanding than that, and she lays it out as a dual obligation the author owes the reader.
I think it’s not enough for the killer to be the person you’d least suspect. It has to be someone that didn’t even cross your mind for a millisecond. And yet, at the same time, it also has to be someone that is meaningful. The killer can’t be the victim’s father’s brother’s best friend’s college roommate, because he was mad about the electric bill being split unevenly.
Behind the plotting instincts is a view of what fiction can do that life cannot. She has named this clearly as a function of the genre, and it shapes her endings not as fantasy but as correction.
My general feeling is that in life, people rarely get exactly what they deserve. But in art, you can dole out that poetic justice.
What she wants us to sit with
Satisfaction by design, not by accidentThe emotional payoff at the end of the book was not left to chance. She described the closing effect she was engineering from the beginning, and the word she used to name it was specific.
I really wanted to write a book where the ‘guilty’ party was thoroughly punished for their misdeeds, so I want my readers to finish the book with a deep sense of satisfaction and smiles on their faces.
Getting to that satisfaction required characters who could not be sorted easily into good or bad. She has thought carefully about what makes a fictional person worth following, and her answer runs counter to the idea that a protagonist needs clean hands.
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!
For a book club working through how they feel about Millie and Nina at the end of the novel, that framework is the right starting point. The question McFadden leaves open is not whether justice was done, but who deserved it, and that gap is where the conversation lives.