An interview with Madeleine Dunnigan

The 'Jean' author on boarding school novels, The Line of Beauty, and the narrative implications of 1976.

Evocative and intense, Madeleine Dunnigan’s debut novel Jean contends with alienation and queerness, with a simmering violence always just below the surface.

Feeling set apart from his peers due to his Jewish background, his socialist artist mother, his class and his fatherlessness, Jean struggles to keep a lid on the inner turmoil which pushes him further into the margins. Set in a British reform school over the hot summer of 1976, the book follows Jean as he is drawn into a closer intimacy with his classmate Tom, with all the complications that brings up.

We spoke to Madeleine Dunnigan about masculinity, otherness, and the enduring popularity of the campus novel.

So first of all, could you tell me about the process of writing the novel and the varying forms it took?

I had the novel idea many years ago. It’s inspired by a family member who disappeared before I was born, but I didn’t know what form that story would take. I didn’t grow up as a voracious writer. I only began really writing dedicatedly in my mid 20s, when I quit my job. So before I could even really embark on the novel, I had a couple of years of learning how to write and figuring out what that was.

I began the novel in earnest, and I must have written one terrible draft that I put in a drawer for a year and didn’t look at, and then started again. I had this image of someone who had disappeared from my family history, and the idea of someone who is interpreted as kind of angry and antisocial. That was one version of the story. The writing was really a process for empathy to get behind that and figure out who that person was and what life was like from their perspective.

Initially there were 3 perspectives. There was Jean’s, there was his mother’s, and there was someone 40 years later looking for Jean. Over the years they intertwined, but it was kind of like writing the same story over and over again. It was only quite late in the writing process that the Jean narrative really took shape, and that became the novel.

I really loved the reform school setting and all these kind of weird traditions that sort of exacerbate or dissolve the established dynamics between the boys.

The boarding school setting is really useful in so many ways. I think there’s no surprise that so many famous novels are campus novels. Limiting where your character can be, what they can do, who they can see, is the genesis of drama and the genesis of narrative and repetition. It makes it easier, you know? Remove decisions and create limitations.

But I didn’t want it to feel tropey, and it’s quite particular to the time period. 1976 is a very specific choice that I made because of its proximity to, and distance from, the Second World War. So you have the kind of overhang of Jean’s mother’s trauma. She’s a German Jewish refugee, an artist, a single mother, very socialist, very bohemian, you know, not religious in any way. A real socialist, communist figure. And 1976, you see this rejection of the liberalism of the ‘60s, and the socialism of the ‘50s, and this new emergence of nihilism, and you have nuclear threat, you have all of the social and cultural forces pushing against it. I wanted that to very much filter into the book without it being overly dramatic, and without it feeling like bad fancy dress.

So the boarding school needed to be slightly different. You had lots of alternative educational institutions emerging in the second half of the 20th century. That was very crucial to it, and I wanted it to be a place where Jean could kind of pull and push against.

One of the things that made the setting so rich for me is that you write clothing and objects and interior design so vividly. Particularly in [Jean’s mentor] Mickey’s house, the elements feel so real.

Well, I’m very glad you said that, because I would say early drafts really did feel like bad fancy dress parties. You know, like everyone was swinging in their bell bottoms.

Mickey is interesting because he’s in his forties. So he isn’t a child of the ‘70s. He was a child in the ‘30s, grew up in the jazz era of the ‘40s and ‘50s, and then was a hippie in the ‘60s. So I had a little more license with the objects that he owns, the way he decorates the house. First of all, he’s a famous pop star, so he has a lot of money. So there’s a little more license with the ostentatiousness.

One of the other things that’s so interesting about the relationship with Mickey is that Jean has this moment where he’s reflecting on it not all that long later, and he’s thinking that he could never point to anything and say, ‘there, that’s what happened’. But he has a sense even at the time that something is underneath.

And there’s another moment where Jean feels really let down by his absent father, which is sort of the catalyst that sets everything off. There are so many men sort of looming in and out of his life, and Jean as a character is trying to figure out where he fits within this masculine environment. What was interesting about masculinity for you?

It’s something I’ve spent a long time thinking about. I think one of the things I really wanted to ensure was that it didn’t fall back on easy cliches. It’s an age old story, you know, the young man feeling alienated because he doesn’t have the father figure in his life. That doesn’t make it any less true, but where it gains meaning is where you make it specific. I wanted to also trouble the different layers of masculinity that you have. That’s connected to queerness as well. It’s telling that Jean doesn’t associate himself with an openly queer community, which did exist at that time. There was Andrew Logan’s Alternative Miss World in 1976, and there was a world of high camp that he could have easily slipped into if he wanted to, but that’s where the collision of his ideas of masculinity and identity and sexuality come.

I think it’s also about mothers and sons, and what is lost and what is gained from the intensity of that relationship. It was interesting that you picked up on that bit of Jean saying he couldn’t put his finger on one thing and say this, because that is kind of what I want the whole book to feel like, that it isn’t one thing. It’s almost like a perfect storm. In so far as masculinity is concerned, I wanted to share it as a whole universe and not a flat kind of separate category.

Of course, Jean’s feelings on masculinity and maleness are complicated by his relationship with Tom. And as you said, there was an avenue for him to explore these feelings in the 70s, but at the same time he’s this particular person in this particular setting where it’s kind of constrained, right?

Yeah. On the one hand, there’s the sociopolitical restrictions on their relationship. There’s the time in which they are born, this sense that homosexuality is no longer illegal, but it’s by no means accepted. It’s not part of the establishment. Then the boarding school directly interacts with that because it’s a very homoerotic space. It’s where these queer acts have been performed for hundreds of years, but they are separated from sexuality. It’s this strange fantasy space where nothing really means anything. You can love a boy, but you’re not gay, because of course you are going to marry someone. It would never be otherwise because of where you’re from and what’s expected of you.

I wanted to play on that in the book, where Tom does love Jean in many ways, but… it’s like saying an apple is an orange. That’s Jean’s great heartbreak, because they’re sort of in two different stories. Jean wants to be in the story where they can go to China, or where they could cohabit, although he can’t consciously admit that. And [Tom]’s happy and easy and breezy because that story doesn’t exist for him.

You’re talking about all these elements that make Jean feel so othered – not just by the external factors of his Jewishness, his class, his fatherlessness, but he also feels othered by something very internal, the impulsive aspect of himself that he can’t really control. How do you go about layering all of these elements?

With great difficulty. What I wanted to show at the end is that it’s complicated, too. Jean sees himself as other and in many ways a victim, and then there’s a moment in the book where he’s like ‘hold on a second, we’re all kind of individual and don’t fit the perfect English mould.’ It’s like, well maybe he could have been friends with them. Maybe the problem was that he was unfriendly. They didn’t reject him.

Then the internal thing I think is a very understandable teenage experience. For most there’s that unbearable teenage angst but luckily, circumstantially and psychologically, these things pass. And I suppose what I was trying to reach is, okay, what if they don’t pass? What if you’re someone for whom the psychological makeup doesn’t allow you to [escape that feeling]?

And then the way that we leave Jean feels sort of perfect.

I wanted there to be kind of some ambiguity or hope at the end. Even if it’s sort of hopeless. It’s very much drawn from Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, that final scene. Everything’s devastating and yet Nick, the character, looks up and he sees something beautiful. That’s sort of what I wanted to show, the beauty in devastation as well.