Willem Patrick
Interview with Madeleine Dunnigan
Madeleine Dunnigan is a writer and screenwriter from London. She is a graduate of the NYU Creative Writing MFA Program, where she was a Jill Davis fellow. Her debut novel, Jean, follows the titular character over one transformative summer and masterfully depicts the tumult, heartache, and rapture of adolescence. It was published in the US on January 13, 2026.
Washington Square Review: One of the most striking parts of Jean is its setting and the very distinct atmosphere and environment you create. Why did you choose London in the seventies and an alternative all-boys school? How did the place and atmosphere emerge?
Madeleine Dunnigan: I knew that I wanted it to be set in 1976 as a very particular time in the UK and in post-war Britain, where you had this sort of political explosion. The sixties have passed, and in ’76 punk arrives, and a kind of nihilistic, violent, rebellious counterculture and politics emerges. But it’s still close to the Second World War to be very much informed by it. The trauma of that period is now manifesting in the children of the survivors, and that felt important as a kind of political backdrop. I had initially tried to write Jean in London, but it really felt like I was at a fancy dress party with all of the wrong clothes. There’s nothing kind of worse than trying to write a period piece because writers in the seventies weren’t like, “He strode down the street in his bell-bottom corduroys and patterned shirt,” you know? He’s just wearing trousers. How do you create that environment without pointing to it and therefore pointing to yourself as an outsider? So the school emerged as a contained setting within which the character could be developed, and things could happen. I also knew I wanted Jean’s sexuality to be very central to the novel, and then the relationship with Tom emerged. And what you had in post-war England at that time was a huge explosion of alternative schooling methods before education was fully nationalized. And that’s a really rich setting for some of the themes I wanted to explore. It’s both contained—it has authority, structure, and discipline against which Jean can push—but it also allows for something more transgressive, more interesting. It reflects this particularly slippery time in history.
WSR: That makes a lot of sense, especially thinking about all of the references to music and culture that are present throughout the book, even though it takes place in this almost siloed world at the same time, which is a cool contrast. I’m curious how far you made it into the version where Jean stays in London and what that looked like.
MD: There were like a couple of years, I mean, the book. I started the book from scratch, maybe seven times. And early on in the drafts, there were a couple of years where there was quite a long section where Jean goes to a party. And the party was one of the early Alternative Miss World shows. Alternative Miss World was set up by a man, an artist called Andrew Logan. Originally, it was at Cambridge University. It was like a pageant show that they jokingly said was based on Crofts, which is the dog pageant show. It was like a Miss World show, but with “alternative” in the name. Artists from the period would perform a promenade in their Miss World outfits. There would be a theme. Lee Bowery was there, Vivienne Westwood was there. Don Letts, who had a shop in London and was a documentary filmmaker, documented the whole reggae scene in London, would have been there. And I tried to write Jean in this kind of punk, but queer, artistic, nuts world. The first one would have been in East London, which at the time was extremely run-down. Nobody ever went there; it would have been in a warehouse. But like I said, it was just, it was really stiff and wooden. And then after I had a few scenes of his schooling, that part just grew, because being in nature, there’s something very . . . I mean, I love it, and I think it . . . it seemed to unlock something in Jean’s character as well. Being an urban character and yet having this very soulful connection with nature allowed me to go further into his interiority.
WSR: That’s actually a perfect segue into one of my questions . . . Which is: how would you describe the role of nature in the novel? Obviously, it’s an important piece and so well rendered, but how would you say it functions?
MD: You know, there’s a lot of intensity in Jean’s internal world. There’s a lot of busyness. And if anything, partly what nature is doing in the book is creating a kind of contrast with that and offering a space of quiet. There was something unruly about having him in the city; having him in a tumultuous setting was too much, and the nature—the lakes, the rivers, his interest in them—it’s kind of a tonic to that. It also provided two connections, one with Rosa historically, and then it’s the space where he and Tom bond. It’s kind of allegorical in a way; in nature, they can be their true selves because they are not hampered by the prejudices or restrictions of society.
WSR: There’s one image from one of the nature sections that describes the skeleton of a seagull so vividly that it’s really stuck with me since reading it.
MD: Yeah, you have life, death, birth, you know, and a teenager who’s going through puberty. It’s kind of, it speaks to everything they’re going through.
WSR: Yeah, totally. That’s a good tagline: “life, death, and a teenager going through puberty.” That’s great. I’m also curious about how you started from scratch seven times. How far would you make it before starting again? And how did each of those drafts inform the others?
MD: I would do a full draft.
WSR: Nice.
MD: And for a long time, it had three different narratives. There was also a narrative of Rosa and a narrative of a woman forty years later, looking for Jean. And actually, some of those narratives were in the draft that had been sent to my editor when she bought it; it was with Jill that we kind of whittled them away. You know, there’s writing a novel that you have an idea of in your mind, and then there’s learning to write. I was doing both at the same time. I had this world and these ideas and themes that I knew I really wanted to contend with. I wanted to do everything at once, but each of those narratives was really three different books. I think I had aspirations to write a great epic knitted together with multiple narrative perspectives, but not just that, with multiple narrative styles and voices. They really were so different from each other. But really, I needed to write the other parts in order to understand who Jean was. The beating heart of the book was always him and his time at Compton Manor. So yeah, quite late in the day when I really said goodbye to those other parts. And when I edit as well, I start with a blank page. So if I edit a chapter, I don’t really edit into it unless it’s a very, very late stage. Then I will weave in the new ideas because it feels like an argument, like one thought. And so it was kind of the same with the whole book as well. I needed to rewrite it every time to understand where things needed to go.
WSR: That’s fascinating.
MD: I don’t know if I would necessarily recommend it. But I definitely think that having the confidence to start from scratch and knowing that nothing’s wasted is a good thing. I learned that from a teacher very early on who said, “I write a draft, I put it in a drawer, I don’t look at it for a year, and then I start with a blank page.” And I remember when he said that, thinking, “Fuck, I’m going to have to do that. I know I’m going to have to do that. I’m not there yet.” I’ve done that probably several times, and I hate the thought of it.
WSR: No, totally. I think about that a lot, too. Brandon Taylor has also talked about what you mentioned earlier: How with your first novel, you’re not only learning how to write a one, but you also have to actually write it, and it’s the only time you’ll be doing those two things at once. Well, I guess whoever really knows how to write a novel? But for your first time, I think it’s something you have to contend with more.
MD: Brandon Taylor also told me that he typed out the whole of his novel again when he was in the late editing stage. And I did that as well, which made me feel sick, actually, typing that many words, having that many words go through you. It was a late draft for [my editor] and I just wanted to get the whole book in my body, but that was horrible.
WSR: That’s a lot of words for sure. It’s interesting to hear the sort of different avenues you went down before arriving at the current form. And I’m curious how you finally arrived at the structure? Because I feel like it’s very sound. Like, it takes place at the end of the school year and during the summer, but it’s also like episodic within that. And I’m curious how you got there.
MD: By episodic, do you mean there are other memories woven in?
WSR: I think I meant there are distinct moments and chapters within a larger period of time whether it’s like the celebration or when they go into the woods.
MD: From a kind of simple craft perspective, and I’m writing about this at the moment, a campus novel is really helpful. Like, there’s a reason so many first novels are campus novels. You know, if you’re trying to figure out what to say, you already know where your characters are meant to be morning, noon, at night, and therefore you’re playing with that or breaking that or having fun with it. So the school setting, again, was very vital to the structure. If Jean were just at home, the number of decisions I would have to make about the way his days looked, the way his life was, multiplied immeasurably. And it could become very loose and baggy. You think, “Okay, well, how does a teenager live in ’76? He probably kind of does nothing. Most of his days are spent, like, smoking weed, and then looking at something, and it’s probably pretty repetitive, actually. Reading that to me sounds kind of boring, or I don’t think I can quite do the Thomas Pynchon, “I’m in a fog, I’m in a haze, and I’m moving through the world” structure. Points in time they can help you figure out what the character was doing, why they were doing it, how they felt, why they felt it. The structure, once I had the setting, felt pretty easy. And then I knew things I wanted to include. I knew I wanted to have party scenes. I knew that the school is both private and public, so Jean and Tom are alone, but they’re never really alone. I knew I wanted the hike scene, which would provide them with that unadulterated privacy, which would then make their return to school all the more difficult and painful. So the episodes and the way I chose them came kind of intuitively from that structure, thinking, “Okay, the first three chapters it’s about building the relationship.” There you have these repetitive scenes. You have this establishing of the setting, the establishing of the relationship, and it reaches a point and a crest. And then it’s like, “Okay, what difficulties do they face? How is this relationship going to be truncated?” Because, you know, motion in narrative is aided by delay. You don’t want to get them together straight away, or that’s just a different kind of novel. I think the emotion of this novel is kind of “Will they, won’t they, and can it last?” So I needed to get to summer. And then school also provides you with pressure because you have the pressure for exams. Summer is such an evocative period because it feels both timeless—it feels endless, particularly if you’re a teenager—and yet, of course, it must end.
WSR: Totally.
MD: I don’t know if that answers your question.
WSR: That’s a great answer. Another thing I was struck by was the capacity for harm, intimacy, and salvation in Jean’s relationships. And I was curious how you were thinking about balancing them throughout the book.
MD: Yeah, I think, I will say, not all of them were balanced initially. There was a point quite late in the day where I was like, “Wow, all the boys at this boarding school are basically interchangeable. I need to make them individual, even if they have like two lines.” I knew very early on that it wasn’t going to end well for Jean, but I didn’t want that to have an easy answer. I really didn’t want that to be blame. I really didn’t want there to be blame in the novel because I don’t think that’s how life works. I wanted it to be more complicated than that and to feel like this is like tragedy through multiple pressures and so many things going on, and so many relationships failing in different ways, rather than being able to point the finger and be like, “It’s because of Tom,” or “It’s because of Rosa.” I mean, Rosa for me is a very sympathetic character. I feel very fond of her. It’s interesting whenever people are like, “God, she’s so cruel!” because I don’t see her that way at all. I spent a long time actually writing from her perspective, and I see her as a desperate mother who’s very lonely with a son who she doesn’t understand, who doesn’t understand her. The way they love, and the way they need to be loved, are so different. That’s where they clash. And I think that’s what was at the heart of each of those relationships. It’s like the way each person needs to be loved and the way they love coming into conflict with each other.
WSR: You can definitely feel that reading it. I think the inclusion of Bruce Lee speaks to that as well. I feel like he’s such a representation of a masculinity that’s both violent, but also peaceful and contemplative. I really loved it whenever he popped up.
MD: I’ve watched quite a lot of Bruce Lee films, but I suppose I was thinking like, “Where do the ideas come from?” And for me, that’s a source for Jean’s contradictions because he’s actually desperately wants to be Zen. Like he idealizes and aspires to be within that, to adopt that ideology and practice, and yet instinctively, because of the experiences he’s had, he’s often not like that. I really wanted to give him a bit more color and texture because I think how he is experienced from the outside is really not how he experiences himself on the inside.
WSR: Totally. I actually just watched Enter the Dragon for the first time last week. It’s a great movie. Do you have a favorite Bruce Lee movie?
MD: That’s my favorite!
WSR: It was fantastic. We’ll wrap things up, but before we do, I wanted to say I was really struck by your acknowledgement section. I thought it was incredibly thoughtful and considerate, and it shows just how many people are part of a novel’s journey. Also, how the people we know, the people we love, find their way into our writing. And I’m just curious if you had anything to say about those who helped you with this project, or if there’s anything that stands out to you about that.
MD: Well, you know, there’s a very loose inspiration from my family history, which I think is clear from the acknowledgements. Is that what you’re asking about?
WSR: Not particularly. I’m just curious about the people who influenced the novel.
MD: I was struck throughout this process by people’s generosity. Like, you’re doing something essentially for yourself, and people have a willingness to share with you, talk to you, to read your work. Like the teachers at NYU. Jonathan must have read four drafts, you know? And when you’re basically a baby, there was some really bad writing that I showed people. It’s almost like running a marathon, and you’re at the very beginning, and everyone’s on the sidelines, and they’re clapping, and they’re cheering you on, and you’re like, “I’ve gone no- where!” You know? I’m not gonna do it in a time. And it’s actually not gonna be that impressive. But like the unprecedented and unfaltering support from friends and family is really the reason I managed to do it, I think. And yeah, it’s a very special thing because you do spend a lot of time alone writing. You do spend a lot of time alone doubting, and it can get really dark. But you know, the person who really has been my guiding light throughout my life, in everything, and in my writing, is my sister. She read everything from a very young age, although we have slightly more distance now. She’s also a writer and an editor. But there’s kind of nothing like that relationship where you speak to someone, and you feel like you have the same brain, so you’re able to talk to someone who understands the way you think in such a deep and intuitive way, and that helps you find what you want to say. This book wouldn’t exist without her.
WSR: That’s beautiful. That’s really sweet. I love that image of the marathon and everyone cheering you on with their homemade signs.
MD: Yeah, I think everyone has an idea that they’re doing it really badly and wrong, and that there’s like a better way to do it. And there’s that person who wrote their book in a year and a half and got a six-figure advance, but like even that person can then take seven years to write their next novel, and it’s not such a success. Writing is messy, and it’s incredibly undignified.
WSR: Oh yeah, totally.
MD: But it’s really nice when you have nice people around you.
WSR: I couldn’t agree more. Messy and undignified definitely sum up my experience.
MD: And there are days when you’re like, “It’s only me, I’m just horrible.” But it’s, like, everyone, everyone is. Everyone is just a baby shitting their pants.
WSR: I could not agree more.
Madeleine Dunnigan is a writer and screenwriter from London. Her first novel, Jean, was published by W.W. Norton in 2026.