Walking Through the Valley of Teenage Rebellion

Madeline Cash talks with Hannah Tishkoff about how her upbringing in the Valley shaped her debut novel ‘Lost Lambs.’

By Hannah TishkoffJanuary 26, 2026

• Fiction

THE WEEK BEFORE I interviewed Madeline Cash, while skipping through the radio stations in my car, I caught the booming, prophetic voice of a pastor reciting the opening line of Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.” Having finished Lost Lambs (2026), Cash’s debut novel, only the night before, my ears perked up in a moment of recognition. If God is our shepherd, then wanting is the condition of having wandered. To want too much is not simply to desire, but also to flee responsibility, to take the reins prematurely, to mistake autonomy for adulthood. In this sense, to be lost is not to be free but to remain infantile. A lamb, not yet a sheep.

In Lost Lambs, Cash offers something like a parable. The Flynn family, a dysfunctional clan living in a small coastal town, is propelled into chaos by a series of desires that quickly spiral out of control: Catherine Flynn has cajoled her husband, Bud, into opening their marriage; their eldest daughter, Abigail, is dating an older boy nicknamed War Crimes Wes; middle child Louise has sequestered herself to chat online with her “boyfriend,” who turns out to be an online terrorist; and Harper, the youngest and perhaps brightest of them all, is convinced that a criminal conspiracy is happening right under their noses, but nobody will believe her. What begins with Harper’s fixation on a mysterious shipping container soon draws in her parents, her sisters, and eventually the entire town. In this world, wanting is both the engine and the undoing.

Cash’s novel is a 21st-century family saga with comic timing and the moral unease of a crime story. Its humor is quick and irreverent, often veering into slapstick, yet it never loses sight of the tenderness that binds its characters together. As the conspiracy tightens, Lost Lambs becomes less about crime than about proximity: how families absorb one another’s bad decisions, how secrecy breeds both intimacy and betrayal, and how modern life encourages the fantasy that we can manage everything ourselves, if only we want badly enough.

In late December, Cash and I met in the San Fernando Valley, where we first became friends in eighth grade. We drove through the neighborhoods that shaped us—strip malls, parking lots and residential streets our families never quite left—stopping and starting without much of a plan. The conversation unfolded in motion, circling questions of faith, family systems, and the realization that independence is mostly a myth. We talked about her debut novel, which, despite its coastal setting and criminal plot, felt uncannily close to home.

We started the interview the way we started our friendship: in a parking lot in the Valley.

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HANNAH TISHKOFF: Let’s go to that convenience store around the corner from my house where we used our fake IDs in high school. When I came home from college and was finally of age, the guy was completely confused. I’d been using this fake Connecticut ID since I was 15, and then suddenly I come in at 21 with a California ID and he’s like, Wait, shouldn’t you be 30 by now? He did the opposite of not batting an eye. He fully batted an eye.

MADELINE CASH: I have such a vivid memory of us buying alcohol there for New Year’s our last year of high school. We still had to use fake IDs, but we were so confident, so chummy with them, like they were family. The Valley is so special.

Why did we hate it so much here growing up?

You have to hate where you grow up, because it’s the only way you’ll leave. It’s like a hero’s journey.

Lost Lambs is so much about wanting: wanting out, wanting more, wanting safety. Did you have Psalm 23 in mind while you were writing? Or am I projecting this idea that we’re all lost lambs until we find our flock?

Not exactly. It’s all so after-school special when it comes to the themes. It takes a village to raise a child or to make systemic change or to do anything. You need a community, but then also what you want is not always necessarily what you need.

Does Lost Lambs have any autobiographical elements? Obviously, I know you really well, but I didn’t find much in the way of autobiography.

Because of the influx of autofiction, I really had a pendulum-swing moment and didn’t want to do that at all. I decided almost as an exercise to write a complete work of fiction, so it went from being no autobiographical elements to no real-world elements. There are no proper nouns [from the real world] in this entire book. Everything, from the brands to the medication to the dinosaur fossils to the names of places in the town, is fictional, even the celebrities. There are no real-world entities, which was obviously fun and challenging. And I got to use puns, which I love to do.

I wanted it to be kind of genreless. I love a family saga, I love Jonathan Franzen and The Virgin Suicides, just kind of classic family stories. But I also wanted to write a mystery, but a late-capitalist mystery, or a post-9/11 mystery. Growing up post-9/11, I was always scared of online terrorist recruiters for some reason. I don’t even think I knew what terrorism was.

Your rejection of autofiction is interesting, because autofiction from an intensely subjective female point of view once felt like a very feminist gesture. What you’re doing now feels like a further evolution of that gesture.

It is very masculine to write straight fiction. It is kind of a boys’ club. I broke up with someone at the Mel’s Diner up on our right.

I used to go on dates there with my boyfriend, whom you met at Lutheran middle school. Something I learned about you from reading this book is that your time in Lutheran school had a much bigger influence on you than I thought.

I went to Lutheran school from kindergarten to seventh grade. And then my biggest act of rebellion was refusing to go back in the eighth grade and graduate with the people I had known for my entire life. To this day, we debate how I got my mother to let me drop out of Lutheran school. I just said I refused to go back, and maybe made up something about how they were stifling my creativity?

Were they? They could have been. You were very creative.

I convinced her that Millikan [Middle School, now Louis D. Armstrong Middle School] had an arts program.

That was somewhat true. It was a performing arts magnet.

Millikan had a sluts program. It was so bad for me. I’d been so sheltered—I’d never been to public school before—so suddenly I get there and I just go crazy.

Rebellion feels like a through line in Lost Lambs. Acts of youthful rebellion feel very formative for you, like convincing your mom to let you drop out of Lutheran school and enroll in slut academy, but there is also something very American about the impulse toward rebellion. Each of the characters is rebelling against something in their own specific way.

They need to rebel to become well-rounded. Even the parents are rebelling against various institutions or systems, like marriage or religion.

For the characters in this book, they have everything, all their basic needs taken care of, but there is still a conflict, a problem. There’s a problem with the plot.

It’s like a disintegration of the American dream. They have the perfect idealized suburban life: two straight parents, three kids, white picket fence, a town with Catholicism at its core, but everything is actually falling apart. I was very inspired by [Lydia Millet’s] A Children’s Bible. I liked this idea that children hold on to something that adults have lost. In the face of ultimate evil, instead of being nihilists and fatalists, the kids are all still motivated to make change and make things better. I have confidence in this next generation of kids: I think they will try to make things better and not just be weird AI babies.

If you are innately outcast because you are an 11-year-old girl, you have no other choice but to rebel against something.

Bud, the main character, has stopped rebelling because he’s beaten to complacency by his life. He has stopped looking for art and joy. He knows something shady is happening with his job but doesn’t care to fight it. Every moral I come up with sounds cornier and cornier, but it is a battle cry to keep fighting for what you hoped for in life and keep believing in things even if you end up back in the San Fernando Valley like we are right now—like, leave it for a little bit and go see the world outside of your town—

I could imagine someone skimming the book and reading it as another nihilistic, super-online portrait of modernity, but I was surprised by how tender it felt. That warmth hits harder because it comes in through a side door. Was it clear to you, when you were coming up with the plot, what you wanted the reader to take away?

I wanted everyone to have a subversion of their stereotype. The church lady who’s supposed to be a nuisance ends up not only complex but also sexual, almost erotically spiritual, and the local pastor is into French cinema. I wanted every figure to undercut how they’re initially read. Even with the blood cult, it was important to me that they weren’t sexualizing the kids; they wanted to commodify them and harvest their blood, but they’re explicitly not abusing them sexually. Finding a deeper layer, however hyperbolic, for each character felt essential and also hard. I was trying to rebel against what you’re told in writing school as well: write what you know; stick to genre; hit beginning, middle, and end; rising action, falling action, climax. I kind of purposefully wanted to not do that.

At the same time, it’s the most simple and classic plot there is, which is that a man meets a woman and they start a family. Okay, if I eat any more of this cake I’m not gonna make it to our next destination, so let’s go. The freedom tasted better then. Now we’re adults and we can buy ourselves humongous German chocolate cake whenever we want, any time of day. Let’s go to the Pineapple.

We’ve arrived at the Pineapple Hill Saloon and Grill. There are no windows. It’s a bar we went to with our friends as teenagers. They have trivia, and a lot of people having affairs. People take their affairs to the Valley, pretty commonly.

Next, I want to stop by the psychic shop, the one where there was some kind of conspiracy that your mom had the intel on.

Oh yes. Someone’s daughter from the psychic shop was abducted by a cult and they had to take them to a hotel to deprogram. My mom also went to a psychic over here in the Valley when she was pregnant with me, and the psychic told her she would never have children. So we’ve never really trusted the psychics from the Valley.

Before we go into the psychic shop, I want to ask: do you believe in God? Religion seems like an important thing for you. You run a magazine called Forever that has a kind of religious aesthetic.

I know, I’ve been grappling with this for so long. I used to think the Serenity Prayer was just a nice poem. Now I’m definitely friendly with a higher power situation, but I don’t have a great concept of what that means in practice. Maybe it’s just the idea that there’s something out there other than me to rely on. Should we get Christmas presents here?

No, it’s too spooky … they have vials of dove’s blood.

I do not think we should buy dove’s blood. Do you think it’s real? They also have dragon’s blood, which is more expensive than dove’s blood, which makes sense. It’s probably harder to get. As we were saying, my spiritual search is ever ongoing. It has changed. What’s your relationship to God?

I was never brought up with religion. Obviously, I’m Jewish, but I never went to Hebrew school. I never had any pressure from the institution of religion. It felt very easy and natural for me to believe in God as an adult. I guess when I was younger, it felt hipper to identify as an atheist with your peers, so I did that.

Ironically, religion had been kind of a form of rebellion for me because my mother had been such a bra-burning nineties liberal feminist. If I told her I believe in an institutional God, she would freak out.

I feel like we’re living in the aftermath of this period where it was really hip to not believe in anything, and we’re all now facing the repercussions of that as a culture. Everybody needs a flock. If there isn’t a flock, if your country doesn’t feel like your flock, or your family, your work, or your support group doesn’t feel like a flock, then your flock is gonna become an online terrorist group!

Exactly. You need other people. I think that probably is my higher power. It’s not a specific person but just community as a whole, whether it’s your support group or a book club. Just the idea that you cannot do anything alone is so fundamental that it’s biblical.

It’s biblically fundamental. It’s like the line in Into the Wild: “Happiness [is] only real when shared.”

It’s what all religion is based on. We need to kind of galvanize around something bigger than us or we won’t make it as a species.

You’ll become a lost lamb. If there is a God, then he wanted us to meet each other at that 7-Eleven in eighth grade. You’re in my flock. I’m really proud of you for writing a book. I still don’t really understand how you did it.

Thank you. I’m excited to write another one.

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Madeline Cash is the co-editor of Forever Magazine and the author of the story collection Earth Angel (2023). Her fiction has appeared in Granta, The Baffler, The Sewanee Review, The Drift, and elsewhere. She lives in New York City.

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Featured image: Photo of Madeline Cash by Nat Ruiz.