The Mad Wife
The Mad Wife
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Meagan Church on The Mad Wife
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A YouTube video and two rejected pitchesThe book did not begin with an idea. It began with two ideas her editor had already turned down. While regrouping from those rejections, she found something on YouTube that changed the project entirely.
Honestly, the idea began with failure. Or at least, rejection. I had pitched two other concepts to my editor, and she kindly passed on both. As I regrouped and tried to pivot, I stumbled across a psychiatric training film from the 1960s on YouTube. In it, a woman dressed like Laura Petrie from ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show’ sits on a therapist’s couch, smoking, legs crossed, and says she doesn’t like it when it’s quiet. What follows is a monologue about her childhood trauma, her failing marriage, and her belief that it’s all her fault because she ‘just needs to get her nerves in order.’ I watched that clip several times, wondering what she wasn’t saying. What she couldn’t say.
The rabbit hole from that film led her to the history of lobotomy, and one specific detail hardened the project from curiosity into commitment. Dr. Walter Freeman, who changed how the procedure was performed, organized a state-sponsored tour of Virginia, performing what Church describes as approximately 228 lobotomies in two weeks from a van he called the “lobotomobile.”
That is just how flippant this sort of procedure was treated in that time period. When somebody can be labeled overly emotional and then they are subjected to a lobotomy because of that, that was really what ignited this fire to tell this story. [paraphrased from audio]
A second, quieter origin ran alongside the lobotomy research. While finishing her previous novel, The Girls We Sent Away, set in 1965, she had been thinking about the mother character that many readers cast as the villain. The question of what that woman’s own life had looked like a few years earlier would not leave her.
There was more dimension to this mother. I kept wondering what life would have looked like for her just a few years prior. [paraphrased from audio]
The final piece arrived during a writing residency at Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities in Southern Pines, North Carolina, where she was revising the manuscript. She learned that a woman named Isabel had lived in the house in the 1940s, been described by a newspaper as “despondent,” and died in the room next to her own.
Lulu is an amalgamation of too many women’s stories, including Isabel, a woman who used to inhabit the room where I slept. And perhaps still does.
How she wrote it
A 50,000-word skeleton and one draft for BitsyShe works as a discovery writer, which means her first drafts are intentionally skeletal. The real novel gets built in layers afterward, and The Mad Wife required at least one draft dedicated entirely to a single secondary character.
One draft had to be Bitsy’s draft, because I’d focused so much on Lulu that now it was time to make sure that Bitsy herself was also developed as a character on the page. [paraphrased from audio]
The period research was tactile rather than purely archival. She ordered a 1953 S&H Green Stamps catalog off eBay and kept it on her desk throughout writing. The stamps were not a random period detail: because Lulu did the household shopping, the stamp redemption program gave her a small pocket of economic agency that did not require her husband’s permission. The object she gave Lulu was chosen to carry that meaning.
Something as simple as the type of hobby they have can say so much about them, and it can say something about them in an indirect way. [paraphrased from audio]
For the grief-heavy scenes, period research was not enough. She needed the emotional state first, and she found it in an unlikely place: two YouTube interviews in which Stephen Colbert speaks with Andrew Garfield and Anderson Cooper about loss. She watched them on repeat before sitting down to write.
I would be sitting at my desk just crying after watching this video for like the 20th time or whatever. Because I needed to be in that mental space, sometimes the inspiration that I needed wasn’t period specific... but it was really that emotion that I needed to tap into. [paraphrased from audio]
She built a playlist of era-appropriate music for Lulu’s party and dinner scenes, but the song that shaped the book’s emotional register arrived from an unexpected source. Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?”, released as the Barbie film was about to open, became so central that Church listened to Eilish’s entire catalog on repeat.
The melancholy of Billie’s songs and the whisper of her voice and the control within her voice too, that really just spoke so much to the theme of this book. [paraphrased from audio]
The book contains two major twists, and she was genuinely uncertain she could execute them. She describes herself as a writer who tends toward quiet literary fiction. To test whether the twists held, she enlisted her two daughters: the older one worked through the story with her from the beginning, while the younger one received a finished draft cold, with no explanation.
When my younger one read it and didn’t see the twist coming, I thought, okay, I’m on to something. I think I’m moving in a good direction. [paraphrased from audio]
Her favorite chapter in the finished book, Chapter Six, arrived in a different mode altogether. “It arrived fully formed and barely changed from draft to publication,” she wrote. “It also introduces the Italian word dormiveglia, which, as Lulu explains, refers to ‘the veiled moments between sleeping and waking, the space in time that floats instead of hurries.’ That concept felt like Lulu’s existence, hovering between illusion and awakening.”
The personal thread
The literary ghosts she carried into the roomHer research into hysteria led her back to two writers she had read before but now read differently: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Sylvia Plath. Both had been dismissed in their own eras as fragile or unstable, and both had left behind work that Church describes as teaching her something specific about what it feels like to be trapped inside that dismissal.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ was one of my earliest hauntings. That creeping, trapped, and dismissed voice taught me how madness can become a metaphor for confinement. Then came Sylvia Plath, whose book The Bell Jar I dissected line by line and whose journals helped me understand her personal battles as well. Both Gilman and Plath had been dismissed in their eras, treated as fragile or unstable.
Writing Lulu eventually stopped feeling like construction. There were specific scenes where the work shifted from shaping a character to something closer to taking dictation, and she found those moments difficult to explain in ordinary craft terms.
There were moments that I was seeing through her eyes, as if a movie was playing out for me, and I was transcribing her experience onto the page... it’s almost as if she is still a real person just living in maybe an alternate universe that I was able to tap into. [paraphrased from audio]
On what the book is wrestling with
Hysteria as a diagnosis, silencing as a systemThe novel is set in the 1950s, but Church positions it as a book about a mechanism that did not disappear when the diagnostic language changed. Lulu, she argues, is a vessel for a much longer history of women whose pain was classified as performance.
Lulu became my way of listening to the housewives, mothers, daughters, and patients whose bodies became battlegrounds for misunderstanding. The diagnosis of hysteria may be gone from our medical manuals, but the impulse to doubt women’s pain is not. That is the horror at the heart of The Mad Wife, not a flickering apparition, but a steady silencing.
The horror she describes is not primarily atmospheric. The book’s central dread is bureaucratic and domestic: the possibility that the people responsible for your care are the ones erasing you.
The real terror lies in the idea that someone could take your agency, your sanity, and call it care.
She did not set out to write a book timed to a political moment, but as the manuscript came together she recognized that the dynamic at its core had not aged into history.
As I wrote, I didn’t realize just how relevant it would feel to our current moment when so many women are again being told to smile, stay calm, and manage the impossible. History echoes more than we think.
What she wants us to sit with
Discomfort as the pointAcross her three novels, her method has been to choose histories that produce anger, then stay in that anger long enough to write toward it. She frames the discomfort that readers feel not as a side effect of the material but as the mechanism by which the book does what she needs it to do.
My aim is always to tell honest, immersive stories with truth and nuance. Sometimes that means we need to look closely at some dark corners of our history. Sometimes it means that we feel a bit of discomfort and even rage. But ultimately my hope is that these uncomfortable stories will start conversations because when we know better, we can do better.
The question the book leaves open is not whether Lulu was right to break. It is why it took so long, and what that endurance cost her. That reframing is where Church locates the book’s real argument.
The shocking part isn’t that she breaks, but that she held herself together for so long.