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