How Lost Lambs author Madeline Cash became the year’s brightest literary star

The word about town is that Madeline Cash has written the debut of the year. In the weeks since the American writer published her novel Lost Lambs at 29, she has been at the centre of rave reviews: The New Yorker praised her “vivid, breezy prose alight with casual wit” while The Times compared the book’s madcap plot, which folds marital problems and suburban girlhood in with terrorist plots and corporate malfeasance, to an episode of The Simpsons.

“It’s been overwhelming,” says Cash one sunny afternoon in London. “I’m a very private person and suddenly my name is in the newspaper.” It’s a precarious position she finds herself in: being a hyped author is thrilling but perilous. It is a vulnerable place to be, the spotlight on full blast and a target on your back. It helps, though, that her book is actually very good – a witty take on the age-old subject of American dysfunction that thrums with charm and originality.

Take her choice to forego all proper nouns: her book is instead set in an unnamed suburb unmoored by geography or history. The effect is dream-like, fuzzy around the edges but specific in its feeling. At its heart, Lost Lambs is the story of a family unit in collapse: parents Bud and Catherine are failing at an open marriage as their daughters deal with the fall-out in their own morbidly funny ways, including at least one terrorist plot – and one vampiric billionaire who siphons blood from beautiful young women in his quest for eternal youth. (That subplot was, in part, loosely inspired by the American entrepreneur Bryan Johnson whose multi-million project to reverse his biological age includes regular blood transfusions with his teenage son.)

If that sounds like a lot all at once, Cash thought so too. “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.”

That dissonance helps explain the endearing tonal oddities of Cash’s novel. That and the fact that she is not only an avid reader, but a porous one. “Whatever I was reading at the time, the book ended up taking on that tone.” There are shades of The Virgin Suicides in the lush malaise of the girls’ suburban existence, and notes of Jonathan Franzen in the granular disintegration of their parents’ relationship. For lessons on pacing, Cash turned to mid-century noirs and Nathan Hill’s splintered America epic The Nix. “My editor was like, ‘This book is great! If you’ve plagiarised it, I’m going to kill you,’” Cash says, laughing.

But the result of this mish-mash is more than the sum of its parts – and Cash lends Lost Lambs something all her own, a wry wit and propulsive narrative voice that a little mimicry alone can’t explain. She has a knack for dialogue that is sharp in its bluntness: “I’ll be needing bus fare,” Harper told Bud. “How much is the bus these days?” asked Bud. “Five hundred dollars.” Bud gave her five. There’s also a genuine love of wordplay that gives rise to playful store names like “Aunt Tiques”, “Helter Seltzer” and a 19th century British-themed pub called “Olive or Twist”. It makes sense that Cash wrote Lost Lambs while working full-time as a copywriter.

Despite the real-life inspiration behind the blood cult, Cash purposefully dialled up the dramatics in Lost Lambs to what seemed a few years ago hyperbolic heights but now appears depressingly believable. “It was really supposed to be this kind of wild Eyes Wide Shut-style mystery and now it seems to be very imaginable,” she says. “I mean, America is kind of crazy right now. We kidnapped the president of Venezuela; we’re in a minor civil war; and then there’s Greenland.”

Conspiracy theories run amok in Lost Lambs. The youngest Flynn daughter Harper is convinced that secret cameras are being used to spy on the town, while another character believes wholeheartedly that the town’s water supply is being poisoned. But these ideas are not presented to be laughed at and in the end Cash is careful to vindicate all of them. The fact is that a mass of misinformation means conspiracy theories no longer feel so far-fetched. Equally, though, do they really matter to your average family like the Flynns? “My biggest concern was paying rent and taking care of my mom so if there was a secret plot behind 9/11 then really, what’s it to me?” says Cash.

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One of the perils of being a young debut novelist that everyone is talking about is that sometimes the talk gets it wrong. Like the comments Cash has seen online claiming that she is a nepo baby flush with generational wealth – an idea no doubt fostered by the fact she managed the not insignificant feat of launching a small and niche-ly successful literary magazine, Forever, during the pandemic. But the launch itself was a grassroots, gonzo operation: a group reading held sans permission at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Afterwards, Cash received a cease and desist. “But it was really respectful and nice,” says Cash. “It was right next to the grave of Elvis.”

As for the nepo baby allegations, Cash is clear: “I grew up lower middle class with a single mum in the valley of Los Angeles. I went to [the New York college] Sarah Lawrence to study writing and it took everything we had to get me there.” She is less fussed about the claims that she is an industry plant: “If someone’s pulling the strings, I don’t know about it and it ain’t me. It’s a conspiracy that I’m fine with!”

There are elements of her life that offer rich territory for a writer; growing up, her mother worked as a hospice nurse at a convent. “Hospice work is very depressing except for with nuns because they aren’t scared of dying – they’re like, ‘Yeah get me there!’ So it was actually quite a joyful and very funny environment.” Not for nothing, Cash once found herself at a New York party not dissimilar to the ominous, moneyed soirees of her book. “It was one of these secret society parties,” she says. “I don’t know how I pulled this invite but it was a loft in Chelsea, which was completely candlelit and everyone was wearing masks, asking strange questions.”

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Lost Lambs, though, is careful not to fall into autofiction – a genre Cash could feel herself being pigeonholed into after the release of her debut book Earth Angel, a collection of short stories about, among other things, growing up and the internet. “For some reason, being diaristic is female and then writing the serious American novel is male,” she says. “I wanted the book to feel genderless with no association to me.” Cash fought to not have an author picture on the book jacket, but lost.

She has already finished writing her second novel, about which she remains tight-lipped. “You know, I’d heard that people get depressed after their first novel because you’ve put everything in there and purged all your ideas and I felt that for a long time. I thought I’d never write again.” Those about to discover Cash through Lost Lambs will be grateful she did.

‘Lost Lambs’ by Madeline Cash is published by Doubleday