The Surrogate Mother
The Surrogate Mother
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Freida McFadden on The Surrogate Mother
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
The feeling she was chasingWhen asked what inspired a specific book, McFadden tends to deflect, and her reason for doing so is worth sitting with before any discussion of this book begins. The question itself, she argues, misunderstands how ideas actually accumulate.
What inspired you to write Book X?... with any book, the motivation can come from many different places, and sometimes we can’t even remember what it was.
What she does document is the emotional target she was aiming at when she first turned toward domestic thrillers as a form. Reading a novel by British author Shalini Boland produced in her a specific, almost physical response, and she decided that was the reaction she wanted to engineer in her own readers.
I kind of wanted to recreate that feeling of being so passionate about this could be happening to me, and this is so frustrating. Like, I want to punch this character in the face.
Abby, the protagonist of The Surrogate Mother, is built to produce exactly that sensation. Her choices feel maddening because the situation around her is designed to make every exit disappear.
The premise of The Surrogate Mother, a couple’s desperation for a child turning into a source of control someone else can exploit, draws on a theme McFadden has named as one of her deepest preoccupations. She connects the longing for motherhood to a specific psychological vulnerability, and to the damage that flows from its betrayal.
The mother-and-child bond is a strong one, and that’s why being betrayed by a mother is one of the most psychologically damaging things to happen to a person. A childhood plagued by a cruel mother is the perfect ‘origin story’ for a villain or antihero.
The Surrogate Mother puts both halves of this equation to work: Abby’s longing for a child is what makes her exploitable, and the surrogate Monica’s history is what explains, without excusing, what she becomes.
How she wrote it
The twist first, then everything elseMcFadden’s drafting process looks chaotic from the outside, but it runs on a fixed sequence. All the visible thinking happens before a word goes down, which is why the physical writing can move so fast once it starts.
I come up with an idea including a twist in advance. I plan it out only in my head for a couple of months, then I spend a couple of weeks banging out a first draft.
The same pattern, described from a different angle, appears in an interview with The Gloss. What sounds like spontaneity in the finished prose is actually the product of a long invisible rehearsal period that precedes every sentence.
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 conversational texture of McFadden’s first-person narration is not only an editorial choice. It has a literal cause that she revealed in the MTTA podcast interview, one that explains why the voice on the page sounds less like composed prose and more like a person thinking out loud.
I actually dictate a lot of my writing. So I think that’s why it sounds very conversational. It’s literally me talking.
The standard McFadden holds her twists to is more demanding than simply surprising the reader. In a She Reads interview she spelled out the two conditions a reveal has to meet simultaneously, and the tension between them is what makes the requirement so hard to satisfy.
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.
Readers who find Abby’s decisions in The Surrogate Mother hard to accept are responding to something McFadden built in deliberately. On Goodreads, where the critique comes up often, she gave a short answer that functions as a design statement.
If they made only good decisions, the story would probably be over within twenty pages!
On what the book is wrestling with
Good people, bad things, and who gets punishedMonica is the figure in The Surrogate Mother who most challenges a reader’s instinct to sort characters into clean categories. McFadden has articulated, across several interviews, why she finds that sorting impulse uninteresting as a novelist.
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!
McFadden has been explicit about the gap between what real life delivers and what fiction can arrange, and she treats that gap as fiction’s primary advantage. The comment below was made about The Intruder, but she frames it as a principle that runs through her work.
in life, people rarely get exactly what they deserve. But in art, you can dole out that poetic justice, which I enjoyed doing again in The Intruder.
Whether The Surrogate Mother lands on the satisfying side of that line, or leaves something unresolved, is one of the questions most likely to split a book club room.
The domestic thriller as a form has a specific genealogy, and McFadden has been direct about which books she sees as its foundation. The genre she works in, and the expectations The Surrogate Mother inherits, trace back to two titles she named in an interview with Reader’s Digest.
The first one that comes to mind is Gone Girl... 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.
What she wants us to sit with
Satisfaction, and what it costsMcFadden stated her ambition for the reader’s final emotional state most clearly in a Writer’s Digest piece focused on The Housemaid. The goal she described there is not catharsis in any vague sense but something more specific: the pleasure of watching accountability land.
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.
The Surrogate Mother asks its readers to decide whether they got that ending, or something more complicated. That question is the argument the book leaves open.