The Girls in the Basement by Maddie Dawson

 LUCY BURDETTE: I've read all of today's guest's books and I have the new one on my bedside table. It's exactly the kind of book that helped get me through the pandemic--and that unfortunately, the kind we still need! I'm happy to have her back to tell you how writing this book got her through the past year and a half as well. Welcome Maddie!

Maddie Dawson: Thank you so much for inviting me back to Jungle Red Writers. I always love to come hang out here.  

Oh my goodness! It’s been quite a year and a half, hasn’t it? Like many of you kindred spirits, I spent a lot of it in my pajamas—writing, writing, writing, peeking at the news, crying, writing more, changing to different pajamas, writing, watching news, crying, writing, baking bread, ordering new pajamas online, writing, declaring that writing can’t exist in such a world, baking more bread, writing, crying, writing, and then one day, to my own surprise, writing the words THE END on the thing I’d been writing.

Which was a novel called THE MAGIC OF FOUND OBJECTS. 

To be honest, the pandemic lockdown came for me at the perfect time: I had a mere four months before the first draft of the book was due to my editor, and in early March 2020, I was still in happy denial, still cavorting around telling myself the book would finish writing itself just as soon as it was in the mood, hahahaha. (I am guilty of magical thinking.) And then—bam! Pandemic time! Lockdown! Suddenly the good of America—maybe even the world—depended upon my staying home and doing my work.

I had thought the novel I was writing was a simple little romcom—the story of a New York woman who has to decide between two men. How fun this will be, I said. Piece of cake, I said. Throw in some fun banter, a sweet little pug named Mr. Swanky, and a Manhattan rent-controlled apartment—and this will be done in no time.

Ha. 

My friend, the fabulous author Barbara O’Neal, claims that our novels are really constructed by “the girls in the basement”—our subconscious mind sending up the real story while we prattle along, following our outlines, working on the surface.

And sure enough, while I’d been out eating lunch with friends and watching movies and doing yoga, the girls in the basement had been doing a deep dive into what love really means. Oh sure, they said, I could keep the dog and the Manhattan apartment, but this, they said, was a story about so much else. 

Slowly, throughout the pandemic, they sent up bulletins for me. Their preferred work time was two in the morning, when I’d wake up to hear them knocking around in my head, ready to tell me a new part of the story. Other times they fell silent while they excavated new details. They didn’t care so much about eating and sleeping. Or reading the news. They had a story to tell me, and they were determined to get it out there. 

And so they did.  

The Magic of Found Objects is about a woman, Phronise Linnelle, who was conceived at Woodstock in a serendipitous liaison between a free-spirited hippie and a farmer’s son—two people who probably should have never even met. After her parents split up and her father marries his former high school girlfriend—the woman he should have been with all along—Phronsie struggles to keep alive the magic and love she has for her real mom, who is beautiful and artistic and who believes the universe guides her every move. Phronsie lives with her father and stepmother and twin brother on the family’s struggling New Hampshire farm, where life is normal and structured, and she come to appreciate that life is so much easier when it’s rational and safe and not fraught with dreams of art and magic.

Now grown up and living in New York, divorced from a man she adored and sick of the forty-four internet dates she’s been on, and feeling once more betrayed by her mom, she can’t help but say yes when Judd, her best friend from childhood, suggests that they give up on romance and marry each other. So what that they’re not in love? Maybe that’s for the best. No hearts will get broken. 

In a diner at one a.m., with a twist-tie ring to seal the deal, Phronsie and Judd embark on a plan to show everyone that the best marriages come when people are genuine friends and that romantic passion is overrated.

But from there, the story took on a life of its own, as novels do when you’ve let the girls in the basement do the telling. They always know what’s right, and what has to happen next. They know better than you what the ending needs to be, and what has to happen to get there.

This book—seemingly just a story about “boy meets girl in kindergarten, then thirty-one years later, boy gets girl, and girl overthinks the whole situation”—turned out to be about magic and practicality; about mothers and daughter and stepmothers; about farm life and city life; about the way two mismatched people can fall instantly in love and change the trajectory of their whole lives and maybe not for the better; about growing up feeling you don’t belong, and then finding your calling, or what is possibly your calling if you even believe in callings, which you’re not sure about. And going on forty-four internet dates. And meeting a guy who carries some gnomes in his pocket. (The girls in the basement were really adamant about the gnomes.)

Aaaaand… it’s, of course, a book about Woodstock and the mud and the music and coming together of half a million people on a farm fifty-two years ago this week. Peace and love and all that. A place where people showed up and discovered they were all connected somehow. They all knew the same songs. Loved the same bands. Wanted the same things. 

There was a lot of nostalgia to wallow in as I sat enmeshed in pandemic life. It wasn’t lost on me that life had once been electrifying, and that strangers from all over could once meet, join together, sing, listen to the music, slide in the mud, and then fall into each other’s lives with such abandon and freedom. 

That’s the gift of fiction, isn’t it—the way it spirits us away, reminding us of what we’ve always known, but maybe have forgotten. Reassuring us that we are not alone, and that although our families are flawed and sometimes our lives are quite ridiculous, everybody else’s are too, pretty much. And sometimes just giving us a place to escape to where there’s mud and music and fun and magic. 

The girls in the basement are busy working on another book now. I get daily bulletins and alerts, for which I’m grateful. I’m no longer in pajamas full-time (and hoping I won’t have to be again), but I’m still quiet, and listening with all my heart. So far they’ve said nothing about any gnomes, but I’m ready for anything. 

LUCY: Love hearing about your process Maddie! I think I need to borrow those girls for my basement for a while...Readers, what book or books have gotten you through the worst times in the past two years?

About Maddie: Maddie Dawson, a transplanted Southerner living in the Northeast,  is the Washington Post bestselling author of nine novels. She specializes in humorous literary fiction, about people stumbling toward love, family, connection, and hope—and usually finding it in the most unlikely circumstances. Her books have been translated into fifteen languages.

Find Maddie at her website...or on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram

The Magic of Giving Up @maddiedawson

LUCY BURDETTE: Don't you love it when one of your "I will buy anything she writes" authors has a new release? I sure do! Maddie Dawson is one of mine--and I persuaded her to visit JRW today. Welcome Maddie!!

MADDIE DAWSON: I’ve always secretly liked the idea of magic. It’s because of my mother, who fancied herself something of a practitioner. She knew how to wish warts away, how to manifest parking spots merely by calling for them, how to find multiple four leaf clovers in any lawn within five minutes, and how to reason with inanimate objects like sewing machines. But perhaps her best magical skill of all was how to marry men with money. (Three of them, to be exact.)

I had none of those skills, particularly the one about marrying men with money. And when I had been married to my first husband for nearly ten years, I discovered that I wasn’t good at marrying men who wanted to be faithful either. My husband had fallen in love with someone else, a woman who declared that she was a witch.

I told my mother.

“WHAT?” she said. “Do not take this lying down. You have to fight witchcraft with magic!”

Magic, huh? So I went to the library and found a book called Positive Magic by Marion Weinstein. I learned about the Law of Attraction and the Law of Allowing, and pretty soon I was able to change stoplights to green, get perfect parking spaces—and after a while, in what was the biggest magic of all, I realized I didn’t want my husband back after all.

Six years later, a psychic told me that my life was just about to undergo a magical transformation—and on the same day, I had my first date with the man who became my second husband. We raised three kids, bought a house, took vacations in France. I started writing novels in earnest—which was what I’d always wanted to do.

And then, six novels in, years after my mother had passed away, I decided I wanted to write a novel that had some magic to it. This felt a little crazy, and I was embarrassed to tell my friends what I was working on. What if it was…stupid? Or what if I couldn’t tell it right? Who was I to write about magic when all I’d ever done was manifest a new husband I adored as well as some pretty good parking spots and green lights?

But if there is one thing I’ve learned over the years about writing novels, it’s this: when you put the intention out there in the world to write a certain novel, characters show up and start telling you the story. And if you’re smart, you don’t dare turn them away.

And sure enough, somebody named Blix came thundering into my inner life, a fictional eighty-five year old spitfire who lived in a Brooklyn brownstone and was full of kindness and love (as well as vim and vinegar) and who just happened to be dying of a cancerous tumor she had named Cassandra. She also had a book of spells and a lover named Houndy, and she loved nothing more than matchmaking and seeing where everybody needed to be in order to be happy. She wasn’t scared of dying, but she knew that her time was running out—so she wanted to find a successor to continue her work, and she just happened to have somebody in mind for the job, her grandnephew’s ex-wife.

I’d like to report that Blix made writing Matchmaking for Beginners a breeze, and that I did nothing but laugh and smile as she narrated her story and I typed it up. That would have been magic indeed. But nope. She was impossible most of the time. She fought me throughout the whole process, withholding information during the day and then waking me at 2 in the morning to insist I get right up and go type. (I did it, too.)

But then—well, after a few months, I felt something shift in me. Blix was bold, and I decided to be bold, too. I started expecting the story to unfold before me instead of worrying that it wouldn’t. I threw out the outline I had made, and I started to trust the process to lead the way. It was scary. So scary! I had a deadline, after all. And I didn’t know where I was going.

One of the magic principles my mother used to talk about the most was the Law of Relinquishment. She said that sometimes when you give up on something—really, really give up on it, no faking—it starts to work out. And Blix seemed to be telling me that that might be the best way to write this book, too.

As a piece of writing advice, it might seem a bit insane—but I really think it’s the best thing you can do with some books (and maybe some life situations, too): GIVE UP. Relinquish the need to control the outcome. Throw out your plan, and see what comes from the unseen world. Let the character tell YOU the story.

And above all, if your character wakes you up in the middle of the night and wants to tell you about the guy who lives in her basement, get up and write it down. This, I learned, is where the story magic happens—when you’re willing to listen hard and feel your way to telling it the right way.

Oh, and when you make it all the way to writing those really magic words—THE END—characters love it when you say “thank you.”

Maddie Dawson is the author of seven novels, including her latest, Matchmaking for Beginners, which is a Washington Post and Amazon bestseller. She lives in Guilford, Connecticut, where she teaches writing workshops and writes novels on her screened porch next to a nest of robins whom she has been known to talk to. She probably needs to get out more. 

On Grandmothers by Maddie Dawson

LUCY BURDETTE: I love all of Maddie Dawson's books (she also writes as Sandi Kahn Shelton), and the newest, THE OPPOSITE OF MAYBE, is no exception. I tried to read really slowly to make it last...

I'm delighted that she agreed to blog for us today--talking about her grandmother, who was a model for a character in the newest novel. Welcome Maddie!

MADDIE DAWSON:  My grandmother wasn’t like any of the other grandmothers.

When I was a kid, all my friends had sweet, white-haired grandmas who looked like they were sent over by Central Casting. They wore loose, flowered house dresses and they smelled like lavender, and yes, they could bake a great oatmeal cookie, and could knit up a sweater or two in an afternoon. I got to see these grandmas up close and in action, when my friends invited me along on museum trips or out for “ladies’ lunches,” where we politely chatted and sipped tea with Grandma.

They were wonderful.

Mine, however, was not like that. For one thing, she wanted to be called “Gigi” instead of Grandma, and she had short blond, bleached hair, a suntan, legs up to there—oh, and the best clothes you ever saw. She wore turquoise and orange and polka dots and hot pink—and she had shoes for every outfit. Closetsful of sandals and stilettos , as well as baskets of costume jewelry! Heaven.
She also had three husbands (not all at one time), and two houses—a regular modern house with sliding glass doors leading outside from every bedroom, and a lake house that, near as I could tell, was built from old sticks and boards people had found along the road. The sun shone through those boards, and the water from the lake was reflected in wavy, dancing lines on the ceiling. The whole house miraculously stood on pilings planted in the lake, so you could walk out the front door and jump right into the water.

We spent lots of lazy summers out there on the lake, floating around in the lake on inner tubes, watching the moon rise over the water while we told stories, and eating the fried chicken and boiled peanuts my grandmother cooked up on the rickety old gas stove that spat flames at her and every single day tried to kill her with its WHOOSH of gas.

She was brave about that, though. I hid when she went to turn it on, but she would laugh. “Hasn’t got me yet!” she’d say.

That wasn’t the only thing she was brave about. There were the snakes that sunned themselves on the dock in the early mornings, and she’d go out to brush her teeth (yes, in the lake—why? You think there’s something wrong with that?) and she’d shoo the snakes away, suggesting they might want to “get on out of the sun, now y’hear?”

She stood up to my mother, too, and when I was 16 years old, Gigi declared I was “working too hard,” and whisked me off for a summer in Hawaii. Just her and me, a whole summer of adventures and traveling. She worked, and I worked at my tan and wrote stories that she read in the evenings.

At the age of seventy, she and her third husband bought a motor home and traveled across the country. She often called me from the highway. “Dahlin’, I went tubing this morning on the Mississippi, and now we’re riding down the road, and I’m cooking us up a pot roast for supper. Wait, John, don’t swerve like that! You’re gonna get us killed!”

Brave. And then some.

I got to see her bravery in action once more when the diagnosis of inoperable liver and colon cancer came. She was only 78, recently widowed but still running her own business, still wearing fabulous clothes, still going tubing on rivers that terrified me. She told me she wasn’t scared; she was ready for whatever came.

When two months later, it came time to move to hospice, she brought in her file cabinets and closed out her business from her hospital bed, talking into the telephone while trailing an I.V. and using oxygen. The doctors and nurses kept shaking their heads. No one had turned their hospice room into an office before.

Twenty-five years later, I wasn’t all that surprised when she showed up wanting to be in a book I was writing. In The Opposite of Maybe, she stars as the grandmother, Soapie, an irascible rascal of a grandmother who, at 88, dates a married man whose wife has Alzheimer's, cheats at Scrabble, and wants to be allowed to die without crazy medical intervention or nursing homes. She’s difficult, opinionated—and my grandmother’s light shines right through her.

As any author will tell you, characters in books don’t tend to come from any one person we know in real life. They are a composite of traits and quirks of lots of people: our third grade teacher, the barista at the coffee house, the guy who fixed the computer that one time, and 70 percent people we’ve made up in her own heads. It’s just the way they arrive in our heads.

But with Soapie, it’s as though my grandmother stepped back into life and said, “Here, honey, let me help you with this book. You’ve been working way too hard.”

Do you have a rescuer in your life, someone who showed you the possibilities of living outside the normal expectations, or showed you how to be brave?

(AND for anyone in Connecticut, Maddie will be reading from THE OPPOSITE OF MAYBE at Burgundy Books in Westbrook at 1 p.m. on May 3 (her grandmother's birthday!) and at 7 p.m. at the Guilford Library on May 7.) For those not in CT, find Maddie on Facebook or her website.