57 pages • 1 hour read
Madwoman
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Background
Authorial Context: Chelsea Bieker
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of child abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and addiction.
Chelsea Bieker is an American author acclaimed for novels that explore motherhood, trauma, and resilience. Bieker was raised in California and Hawaii, the setting of much of her fiction. Bieker’s debut novel, Godshot (2020), was longlisted for The Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and named a Barnes & Noble Pick of the Month. In Godshot, a drought has devastated a fictional California town, leading its residents to seek answers from a charismatic cult leader. Godshot was acclaimed for its depictions of coercive control and desperation, aspects that it shares with Madwoman.
In Madwoman, Bieker draws inspiration from her own life. Like Clove, she moved from California to Hawaii when she was young with her father, who was abusive, and her mother, who had an alcohol addiction. Like Clove, she had to grow up at a young age due to life circumstances. While in the novel, Clove pushes her father off the apartment’s balcony, in real life, Bieker’s parents divorced, her grandparents became her caregivers, and she kept in contact with her parents via phone calls. Although Bieker didn’t escape and create a new identity for herself like Clove in Madwoman, she said in an interview, “I’m writing into this idea of, what would’ve happened if?” (Trueherz, Matthew. “Mostly True Stories: Chelsea Bieker on Her Novel ‘Madwoman.’” Portland Monthly, 17 Sep. 2024).
Bieker also published a story collection, Heartbroke (2022), which won the California Book Award and was a New York Times Best California Book of 2022. She is also a recipient of the Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award and residencies from MacDowell and Tin House. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and two children.
Literary Context: Psychological Thrillers
Madwoman can be classified as a psychological thriller, a genre that explores the psychology of obsessive and pathological characters to elicit feelings of excitement and anxiety in readers. By contrast, traditional thrillers typically focus more on external threats or physical danger. Psychological thrillers are often similar to Gothic or detective fiction, exploring how illusions and falsehoods influence surface reality. Psychological thrillers emerged as a distinct genre in the mid-20th century, though their roots can be traced back to trailblazing 19th-century authors such as Edgar Allan Poe. Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) marked a significant milestone in the genre, introducing an unreliable narrator wrestling with paranoia and jealousy within the confines of a seemingly perfect marriage. Patricia Highsmith further developed the psychological thriller with Strangers on a Train (1950) and The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), which delve into the minds of sociopaths and explore the thin line between ordinary people and those capable of murder.
Contemporary psychological thrillers often incorporate domestic noir elements, examining the darkness lurking beneath seemingly normal relationships and family dynamics. Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012) exemplifies this, using dual unreliable narrators to explore themes of marriage, identity, and manipulation. Japanese authors like Koji Suzuki and Korean writers like Jeong You Jeoung have contributed significantly to the genre, with their work often exploring collective trauma and societal pressure alongside individual mental states. Psychological thrillers frequently incorporate elements of other genres, including crime fiction, domestic drama, and literary fiction. They tend to focus on psychological realism, complex character development, and subtle building of tension rather than overt violence or action.
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