Madeleine Dunnigan

Madeleine Dunnigan is a writer and screenwriter from London. She was a Jill Davis Fellow on the MFA at New York University. While there she was awarded a GRI Fellowship in Paris.

Dunnigan's new novel is Jean.

My Q&A with the author:

What's in a name?

I knew Jean’s name early on. Jean’s mother is a German Jewish refugee and a francophile. I knew Jean’s name needed to be French because of this; I also knew it needed to complicate his identity as an English teenage boy.

In French, ‘Jean’ is a boy’s name; in English, we would use ‘Gene’ for a boy and ‘Jean’ for a girl. This subtle difference, although not pressed upon in the novel, was essential to the crafting of his character. From birth, he feels like an outsider. To others, there is something mysterious and foreign about him.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

Although I always harboured creative aspirations, as a teenager I found the idea of spending hours alone, writing, unbearable. I wanted to be with people all the time. The fact that I wrote a novel at all would certainly surprise my teenage self; and that it was this kind of novel, so different from my own life, would shock her even more.

And yet, it was novels like Le Grand Meaulnes that kept me awake reading at night as a teenager: novels about teenage angst and lost love, which is what Jean attempts to capture.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Honestly, both were obscure to me for a long time. Once I had the contained setting of my novel, and had cut away much of the extraneous extra material, they became much clearer.

Having said that, I rewrote the ending several times: I knew where I needed to get to, but how I would get there – what exactly Jean said, how he reacted, what he felt – was unclear to me. Plotting the emotional journey of a character so that what he ends up doing feels inevitable rather than dramatic was a big challenge.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

At a first glance, Jean and I could not be more different. Jean is a seventeen-year-old boy in 1976; I am a thirty-three-year old woman in 2026. He is tall and blond with blue eyes; I have dark hair and dark eyes. He grew up in West London; I, in East London. He is violent and antisocial, school has always been a challenge, as have social relationships; I have spent most of my life in educational institutions.

But I feel deeply, emotionally connected to him. As a writer I return again and again to my adolescence. Although very different from Jean’s, what I remember most is the overwhelming rage, the powerful desire and the unbridled freedom. It is this that links us together: the shared experience of the intensity of being a teenager.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Having not grown up in the seventies, I spent a long time researching Jean. I listened to Sex Pistols, The Slits, The Clash. Reggae and ska were also big influences. I watched punk-era documentaries and the work of Don Letts, and I scoured photo books of the era, looking for clues.

Jean’s mother, Rosa, is an artist. I looked at the influences that inspired her work, Rembrandt and Cezanne, alongside children’s illustrators of the era.

Then there were the films. Gorgeous love stories like Call Me By Your Name and rural escapes like God’s Own Country. I drowned myself in Bruce Lee’s films, like Enter the Dragon, and films from the seventies like Clockwork Orange and Star Wars.

Visit Madeleine Dunnigan's website.

My Book, The Movie: Jean.

The Page 69 Test: Jean.

Writers Read: Madeleine Dunnigan.

--Marshal Zeringue