2 Girls 1 Book: Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash

Is the hottest debut of the year worth the hype?

Welcome back to 2 Girls 1 Book, a monthly cross-post where Ochuko Akpovbovbo and Pandora Sykes chat about a book via Google Docs.

For our tenth edition, we’re talking about Lost Lambs, by Madeline Cash - a family saga set in America (most likely, California) where Bud and Catherine Flynn are in a nonconsensual open marriage (she wants it, he doesn’t) and each Flynn daughter is in their own, highly specific crisis: 12-year-old Harper is a relentlessly bored child genius who has uncovered multiple local crimes that no-one will take seriously; Louise is the long-neglected middle child seeking love in fundamentalist forums; and Abigail is the prettiest girl in the room (most of the time), who cares about little other than her mute military boyfriend with IBS, War Crimes Wes. And that’s just for starters.

As ever, we’d LOVE to hear from you in the Comments. For those of you who like to read along, next month we will be discussing Good People by Patmeena Sabit.

​​Pandora! No exaggeration, this was the best thing I’ve read in a long time. The hype is real. More importantly, the hype is earned. It’s rare that something this talked about actually exceeds expectation, but this did. It was properly hilarious - not quirky or gently amusing. Genuinely funny. And original in the ways that count. How did you find it? Don’t burst my bubble!

I LOVED IT. I touched on it last week in a Q&A, as two people asked me about the hype around Lost Lambs - and whether I thought it was justified - and I said yes, in this instance (not all instances!) I did. Not only did I think it was masterfully and totally realised - every character felt distinct, every scene was immaculately paced and crafted, every plot point as wild as it was brilliant - but it was also so funny, as you said, and so tender. What I loved is that it was really sincere. It wasn’t cynical, or full of ennui. Even when people were depressed, like Bud was, he wasn’t just sitting still. No-one sat still, scrolling on their phones.

I loved how fast-paced it was. I felt carried along rather than rushed, which is such a difficult balance to strike. I’m a big family saga fan and the “big family with unhappy parents” framework is not new, but this felt fresh because each character had such a distinct engine. Everyone had a strange and specific obsession driving them. Even the minor characters had side quests that felt purposeful. And the most impressive part is that it all connected. Nothing felt ornamental. It was chaos, but engineered chaos. That level of control in a debut is wild to me.

Such strange and specific obsessions - and the most idiosyncratic idiosyncrasies: Catherine’s love interest/ neighbour with his basement of hand-crafted ceramic vulvas (one for each lover); a longevity billionaire (and Bud’s boss) who holds Eyes Wide Shut-style parties; a former soldier with IBS (I feel you, my dude) known as War Crimes Wes. Even the lack of plot for Louise was specific, because it served as a metaphor for the middle child’s erasure. And Tibet was lol!

Yeah, Louise’s relative lack of plot felt intentional. And Tibet was funny. That kind of relentless, precise absurdity takes discipline. (And drugs.) It was a thrill! The obvious comparison is Franzen, but that feels like low-hanging fruit.

Say more.

I think that comparing any slightly offbeat family saga to Franzen can feel lazy, like calling every millennial love story ‘Rooney-esque’.

Amazing how often I see that on a press release and then read the book and think, this is nothing like Sally Rooney.

It’s easy shorthand. But I do think it fits, here. It’s the ecosystem - the specificity of each character, the slight air of decay, the conspiratorial subplot, the small town disrupted by a strange anomaly, in this case a billionaire who happens to both run the town (he owns the port) and be Bud’s boss. It has that same sense of a contained world rotting just slightly at the edges.

Decay is a great way of putting it. It’s exactly that. I can see the Franzen influences but for me it calls to mind more The Bee Sting, The Family Fang (neglectful parents wrapped up in their own marriage) and Katherine Heiny (specifically her short stories) with the sincerity and absurd humour. Maybe some Alison Espach, too. But really, the dialogue is in a league of its own. This conversation between Harper (who is 12) and the town’s priest, illustrates it well:

“You’re a precocious girl.”

“If I had to guess, gun to my head…”

“No one is holding a gun to your—”

“Gun to my head, I’d say, I’m incredibly, painfully, mythically bored,.”

“I see. The disobedience of banality.”

“I am a victim of neglect.”

“We’re offering a virtual Sunday school—”

“I don’t want to go to virtual Sunday school.”

Harper hit her vape.

“Have you renounced your faith?”

“My virtue is post-theocratic.”

And then when Louise has been outed as being on the no-fly list and Catherine decides it’s finally time to clean the house: “No wonder they were so odd. Their unformed brains were subject to spores from unknown mosses and moulds…” That made me literally laugh out loud. It was so funny in context. I also loved all the bits about War Crimes Wes and his IBS. I do find Franzen funny, but in a more understated way. His work requires a lot more labour from its readers, which sometimes stresses me out. Lost Lambs is just as intelligent, but it flows better. You can take it all in without spending too much time chewing, if you know what I mean.

I do. It’s so deliciously easy to read. To get into the granular, stylistically - because Cash is a stylist - what did you think about the g’s scattered over the text, to represent the gnat infestation? People seem quite divided on that tic. And secondly, what did you think about the fact that nothing was its real name? Pills weren’t Xanax or Valium or Ritalin - they were yellows, purples, blues - and there wasn’t Instagram or TikTok or McDonalds. You can tell she had a lot of fun with the local store names: Aunt Tinques, the ice-cream shop called… Anne Frank’s Dairy.

It took me a while to catch on to the gnats thing, but once I did, I thought — wow, brilliant. It pulls you out of the moment just enough. But I didn’t actually catch on to the no-brands thing. What are your thoughts on that?

I think it’s really smart. I think it lends the book a timeless, broader appeal. It allows you to get lost in the narrative rather than hooking on to certain recognisable names, because the brain does do that, I think, with brands, and I find it quite disruptive. My pet hate for instance is when books describe a rich person like, she grabbed her Smythson wallet, and put on her Hermes coat. Show me, don’t tell me. By the same token, I don’t need to know that Abigail wears Brandi Melville (she def does), there are other ways that Cash tells me she’s very into her appearance and very body conscious.

So, the reviews have been almost uniformly rave for this, but I read one in The Atlantic - and it’s a good review, well-written, thoughtful etc - that said Lost Lambs didn’t quite land because of the lack of cynicism; that it’s not realistic that the Flynn family are not damaged by their forays into trafficking, fundamentalism and a chaotic open marriage without boundaries. Did you think it dealt with serious themes too pithily? And do you care?

I don’t care even a bit. I don’t need this book to be any more realistic than it is. I loved its irreverence and I think that normalisation of the absurd is commentary in itself. I don’t believe that all media is obliged to send the morally correct message. Something else that’s fun about this book is Madeline Cash’s trust in her readers to get it and go with it!

Couldn’t agree more. I actually really liked closing the book with a big grin on my face. I really wanted them all to prevail. Not just prevail, thrive! Speaking of, do you think Cash is making a point by drawing Catherine as a really terrible mother, who does not suffer any consequences? The girls are basically starving. Catherine is too busy lying in the bath smoking weed, or venturing over to the neighbour’s house who she is considering an affair with, only to find, to her horror, that he keeps a basement filled with ceramic interpretations of every vagina he has ever slept with. Oh god, that made me laugh. Jim gives her a little tour of his pussy palace. And he has a sign on the lawn that says, “An Honour Student Lives Here” that for some reason just kills me. It’s all so specific, and deliciously gross, she has not wasted a single opportunity.

That scene is particularly funny. So, I don’t think I evaluated Catherine very much as a parent, so much as a character in her own right. I was the least interested in her arc. Her motivations and personality were a bit fuzzy to me and I wish I had more of an indication of what she was like pre-affair. Was she always such a bad mom? But not once in the book did I think, she’s a bad mom. She seemed the most sad to me until the end, but at the same time I didn’t feel bad for her.

Being a mother is not a large part of Catherine’s character which is hilarious when you consider that she has three teenage daughters; but also, really fun to read, I’m so used to fictional mothers carrying all the weight, feeling the burden of responsibility/ guilt/ shame etc etc, Cash inverted the idea of maternal responsibility and let Catherine just live her best chaotic, self-indulgent life and I loved it. That said, poor long-suffering Bud. Catherine’s been hanging huge portraits of herself all over the house to try and get his attention.

Who was your favourite character? Mine is Harper.

I loved Harper the most, obviously. I don’t think I’ve ever read a character like her. Abigail was a fairly common elder daughter trope but War Crimes Wes and that dynamic made it interesting. She was so so truly delusional it was hilarious. But also SUCH a teenager! I appreciate how explicit Madeline Cash made her relationship to her body. And Catherine’s, too. For most of the book, Abigail doesn’t want to be like her mom - but they are so similar.

I loved when she has this rare moment of humility and realises that while she is normally the prettiest girl in the room, today she is the 21st prettiest girl in the room. Hers and Wes’s love story is really tender, but I did get a bit stuck on the fact Wes is dating a 17-year-old? It definitely didn’t feel like the book that seriously, nor did it take Abigail’s eating disorder seriously, but then again, the book didn’t take anything seriously - I mean, look at yourstruly and Paul Alabaster, they were treated with the same amount of seriousness as Bud and Catherine’s marriage woes. The church’s ‘inner beauty’ pageant is on the same playing field as the gnat infestation which is on the same page as the missing cargo ships, and so on and so forth.

I learned something important from this book: readers will likely only take things as seriously as the author does. I barely thought about the age difference. I think I felt this sense of safety — because everything was so delulu and the author herself seemed only mildly alarmed, it all felt fairly low-stakes, which made the reading experience a lot of fun. I didn’t fear for these characters, even though, really, I probably should have. What do you think about the idea that readers only take seriously what authors take seriously?

That’s such an interesting question - and one I’m not sure I’ve ever considered before. I think you are right. I think that might be why you didn’t ever think about Catherine’s role as a mother, for example, because Cash didn’t take her maternal neglect seriously. The girls periodically complain about her never cleaning the house or cooking for them - Abigail writes, GO TO THE MARKET, on the ‘crisper’ (what is a crisper!?), but it’s kind of presented as just one of many things a daughter could complain to her mother about.

Things are not withheld from Catherine because she’s a shit parent. Aside from Bud’s attention, everything she wants is hers. Bad mothers are usually punished in books (and very much real life, too). But her children love her, she doesn’t struggle to find lovers, she isn’t exiled socially, she doesn’t lose her beauty. And maybe she wasn’t always this bad. Maybe she’s just having a crisis - we don’t spend long with them, just a matter of a few weeks, so we don’t know if she’s usually a ‘regular’ mom. Who knows? Who cares?

That idea of her not being punished is so powerful. I genuinely didn’t clock that at first, but it’s completely true. Even in all her self-reflection, she barely interrogates her mothering. She doesn’t spiral about it. She doesn’t narrate herself as a failed woman. She doesn’t punish herself. And that feels radical, as you say. We are so used to fictional mothers being morally audited. If they neglect their children, there’s usually some narrative reckoning - illness, social exile, or emotional collapse. At the very least, crushing guilt. Catherine doesn’t get any of that. She remains intact. She desires, she reflects, she adjusts slightly, but she is not narratively humiliated. It feels like Cash is refusing to perform the cultural script where women must suffer proportionally to their perceived failures. Catherine is flawed, yes. Self-absorbed, definitely. But she is not framed as monstrous. And she is not stripped of love. Her children still orbit her, she gets a new love interest, enjoys a good relationship with her ex… The world does not close in!

She absolutely does not punish herself! The woman is totally fine with who she is!

The novel withholds moral punishment in a way that mirrors its broader tonal choice and refuses to escalate anything into tragedy. It allows people to be ridiculous and inadequate and still continue on. That refusal to punish her might actually be one of the boldest and most subversive things the book does.

And I do think that that’s one of the main reasons we both loved it, even if we didn’t consciously note that until we came to talk about it. Anything that didn’t jive for you?

I wished for it to be longer, and cover a broader timeline. But the story was powerful because it was so tight. I guess I just wanted more!

I was so desperate for more that I felt actual fury when I went to buy her short story collection from a few years ago, and realised it wasn’t published yet in the UK. They are publishing it later this year, after the success of Lost Lambs. The stories sound so up my street. I adore short stories, particularly bonkers ones. These sound like they have the same chaotic trappings as her novel.

I cannot wait. Madeline Cash is a star.