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How Far Will You Go to Belong?
The Belladonna Dozen follows twelve friends whose annual game of anonymous dares becomes deadly, forcing one to question how far loyalty, loneliness, and the need to belong can push ordinary people. What inspired the idea of the Draw, and when did you realize it could serve as the novel’s central game?
My inspiration for the Belladonnas and the Draw came from a White Elephant party I was invited to a few years ago, in a lakefront community where my husband and I had just purchased a home. A couple of the women asked when I was moving in, and when I mentioned that we intended for this home to be for weekends only, I admit there were a few hitched breaths. They didn’t want to hear that.
I spent a few hours watching these women interact, listening to them share old stories, asking after each other’s family. While they were friendly to me, it was obvious how close they were and how much history they shared. I was the outsider. That gathering was the seed for the Draw and all the possibilities that could come from such a tight-knit group of friends. The Belladonna’s spite and bad behavior is solidly the product of my wild/overactive imagination.
Edie often rationalizes increasingly troubling behavior; how did you approach writing a narrator whose judgment gradually becomes shaped by the group around her?
It’s no secret female friendships can be tricky. There are all sorts of things that glue female relationships together, like similar personalities, hobbies, careers, and even motherhood. Edie comes from a rocky childhood where she had no stable parenting and moved constantly. As a result, she had no consistent friendships and no true understanding for how a close circle of friends operates. On the other hand, I grew up with the dearest of girl friends who I consider like sisters. I had fun turning what I know on its end and putting Edie in the space of someone who has no sense of how to behave among a dynamic group of women.
When the Belladonnas first come together, their kids are their “social passports,” and other than motherhood, Edie knows she had nothing in common with the others. “Belonging” is everything to her, and the Belladonnas are her lifeline. She is so desperate to keep this connection that she justifies bad behavior on the pretense of “morality” and “following rules.” She has lost her individuality and identifies only as a member of this group.
The Belladonnas’ friendships contain genuine love alongside resentment, rivalry, and manipulation. What interested you most about exploring the darker side of decades-long female friendships?
Women, in general, are programmed to “play nice” when we first enter a group setting. We want to be accepted; we want to conform enough to be liked. When meeting other females for the first time, we’re taught to get along, to smile and applaud, to show interest, to support and agree, or to fake it if we don’t believe it.
But once women feel comfortable around each other, especially after spending three decades together like the Belladonnas, there’s a collective understanding that we can drop the façade—we have the green light to bitch and complain. When pretenses can be swept aside and we feel free to let out our dark side, that can be a bonding experience. It’s fun to gang up and back stab. It strengthens camaraderie.
Motherhood, aging, and the loss or reinvention of identity are central to the novel. Why did you want to place those experiences at the heart of a psychological thriller?
Actually, the words that define a psychological thriller—guilt, secrets, paranoia, and mind games—are the very same words that plague women as we move from our thirties through our forties and fifties and into our sixties, constantly pivoting and evaluating who we are and how to reckon with new purpose.
Guilt: Am I parenting in the right way? Am I spoiling my kids too much? Am I paying enough attention to my husband? Volunteering for the right organizations? Working too little or too much?
Secrets/Trust: Can I share my parenting/marital concerns with XYZ friend/group of women? Should I fess up to knowing something that might hurt someone? How can I use a certain bit of information to get ahead in my job or to give my kid a leg up?
Paranoia: Is my husband still happy with me? Can I trust that my friends will keep my confidence if I share concerns with them? Is XYZ friend talking behind my back?
Playing mind games: Where do I fit in? Women, whether we like to or not, are always jockeying for position in a group. Whether official or not, someone is the leader, the planner, the advice-giver, or the funny one everyone wants out for Happy Hour.
Most women readers will relate to the normal themes of aging and reinvention the Belladonna Dozen romanticizes. Then, on top of that, this story evolves and sprinkles in a concept so naïve and wicked, the reader will bear witness to how far women will go—to belong.
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The Belladonna Dozen
Deb Collins’s The Belladonna Dozen is a darkly comic psychological thriller about twelve women whose three decades of friendship have hardened into something more complicated than companionship. Living around the secluded Spur Lake, the Belladonnas have raised children together, weathered marriages and divorces, and built an elaborate private tradition called the Draw. Each Christmas, they anonymously contribute dares, randomly select them, and spend the following year completing them before recounting every detail in a ritualized Reveal. What began as harmless entertainment has become a source of purpose for women confronting empty nests, aging, stale relationships, and the unsettling question of who they are when motherhood no longer fills their days. Edie Monroe states that loss of identity plainly in the prologue: “We’d lost sight of our capabilities, our passions, our dreams.” Collins builds the novel around that hunger for stimulation and belonging, making the Belladonnas’ increasingly reckless behavior an extension of needs that are recognizable even when their choices become extreme.
The story is narrated primarily through Edie, whose need for order makes her especially vulnerable to the rules imposed by Lilith, the group’s domineering unofficial leader. The novel’s strongest psychological element is Edie’s gradual realization that the Draw hasn’t merely given structure to her life. It has begun determining how she evaluates friendship, loyalty, morality, and even danger. That conflict becomes urgent when, after the Christmas gathering, Edie discovers an abandoned dare with deadly intentions. From there, Collins turns a seemingly outrageous premise into an increasingly claustrophobic examination of group psychology. Edie begins studying the women she has loved for thirty years as potential victims, suspects, and threats, while the anonymity of the game allows every resentment and alliance to acquire sinister possibilities. The suspense comes as much from watching Edie rationalize her thinking as from discovering where the dare itself will lead.
Collins also gives the book a striking ensemble quality. Lilith, Rita, Colleen, Jacqui, Annalise, Tricia, Maeve, and the other Belladonnas have distinct relationships with the game and with one another, and their accumulated histories create the feeling of a family whose affection and grievances are inseparable. Colleen is particularly important because her terminal illness gives the novel an emotional counterweight to its darker comedy, while Rita’s willingness to challenge Lilith exposes how thoroughly habit has become authority within the group. The book repeatedly shows that the women understand the Draw has crossed dangerous lines yet remain unwilling to surrender what it provides. After an innocent-seeming dare contributes to a young man’s death, Rita identifies the problem with painful clarity: the women have become “programmed” to turn each assignment into the most extreme version of itself. That tension between genuine friendship and collective moral surrender gives the novel much of its force.
By the end, The Belladonna Dozen becomes a story about appetite as much as loyalty: the appetite for attention, excitement, secrecy, belonging, and the intoxicating approval of people who have known you for most of your adult life. Collins follows those impulses to a deliberately disturbing conclusion in which the rituals and language of the Draw become inseparable from the women’s understanding of themselves. Edie recognizes that the game has “filled in the holes previously taken by motherhood,” a realization that helps explain both her devotion to the Belladonnas and the frightening distance she ultimately travels for them. The ending is audacious and consistent with the novel’s increasingly macabre logic, bringing together its recurring ideas about control, resentment, reinvention, and the seductive security of belonging to a closed circle. The Belladonna Dozen is a sharp and unsettling portrait of female friendship in middle age, told through women who refuse to fade quietly into the background and instead create a private world with its own traditions, pleasures, cruelties, and consequences.
