Madeleine Cash

In my semester abroad, I went to Chicago, which, if you are familiar with American geography, is not abroad.

And went to a school called the Second City where they, it's just sort of like an American school of comedy.

And so all of my friends were in Florence or at Oxford and I was in freezing Chicago trying to learn how to be a clown.

And at the end they told me that I didn't have what it takes to do it.

Yeah, to do to work in comedy.

Wow.

And so I think that this was my they'll all see mission to write like a sustained work of comedy that also or like of satire that, you know, also kind of had some insight into like the American family and just topics that interested me.

I mapped them out pretty thoroughly as characters because they don't resemble my own family or anyone I know.

They were complete works of fiction.

So I kind of drew character maps and charts and things to help navigate because it also is from this sort of polyphonic narrative where they each tell a little bit of the story and it gradually progresses that way.

And you're not totally sure...

if you can trust any of them.

But I don't know.

I feel the same way as Bailey.

I'm very endeared to them as well.

Yeah, definitely.

So I'm an only child, which I think has its own set of problems.

But I had to think of the daughters a little bit more as different iterations of myself as an adolescent than siblings, like the 12-year-old me versus the 17-year-old me.

Because I didn't really have the context of sibling dynamics, but there were in my house like a...

My mom was very much of the, like, it takes a village to raise a family type of person.