Inside Teddy’s World

The 1920s of Tomorrow: Love Reimagined

Teddy Madison is a genre-blending queer tragicomedy that reimagines identity, love, and grief through the fragmented recollections of a sharp-tongued memoirist. Set against the glamour and upheaval of the early 20th century, it’s a haunting, humorous, and deeply intimate portrait of a man torn between memory and myth, truth and performance. Think historical fiction with a progressive pulse and a literary heart.

“How delightful Teddy was at dinner that night, leaving Harrison with awestruck eyes and lips panicked with pleasure, as he sat diagonally from his husband at the table. From behind the tall white candles in the silver candelabra, Teddy still managed to make the dashing captain enamored with a curious version of wonder. ”
— Narrator

Fun Facts

Teddy Madison reimagines the past through an inclusive, liberating lens, offering a glimpse into a world that could have been. Set during the Roaring Twenties, an era of jazz, transformation, and societal tension, the novel dares to strip away the rigid expectations of gender, sexuality, and love. In Teddy’s world, identity is not hidden or scandalized, it’s simply lived. Through a blend of historical accuracy and imaginative storytelling, the line between fact and possibility is beautifully blurred.

Told through the voice of Mrs. Fairfax, Teddy’s sharp and sometimes unreliable memoirist, the story unfolds across cities like New York, Paris, London, and Louisville. As she pieces together his life from letters and diary entries, readers are drawn into a layered narrative where every detail matters and memory itself becomes a battleground between truth and perception. Teddy, a former art student in Paris and the host of a progressive salon in New York, is both a dreamer and a realist, trapped in a world that both fuels and confines him.

At its core, Teddy Madison is a tragicomedy of identity, grief, love, and longing. It explores the emotional terrain we all navigate: the loss of loved ones, the ache of unfulfilled dreams, and the internal tug-of-war between morality and desire. The characters are flawed, complex, and deeply human, wrestling with the very things that make us who we are. This emotional richness is mirrored by a world steeped in art, mysticism, and psychological depth—from Freud to fate, from clairvoyance to ballroom dance.

The novel also asks a larger question: What if history had taken a different path? How might that have shaped our present? While the setting is historical, the themes are strikingly contemporary, challenging not just the prejudices of the past but the ones we still carry today. As a gay Roman Catholic, I’ve poured my struggles into this story - the friction between faith and identity, belief and truth, tradition and progress. Writing the book was both an act of catharsis and a call to reflection.

So, can you love Teddy Madison - even after knowing him completely? His story is messy, poetic, fragmented, and painfully real. As he pushes against Mrs. Fairfax’s efforts to define him, the reader is invited to do the same: to question, to feel, and to confront their memories and myths.

Step into his world - a world where every sense is engaged, every emotion laid bare. Through Teddy’s eyes, you’ll encounter the beauty, discomfort, and complexity of the human condition - and perhaps, something of yourself, too.

Map of Edenridge Estate with numbered locations, including main house, family homes, stables, pool, gardens, and cemetery, situated between Georgica Pond and the Atlantic Ocean.
“It’s sad to think that we’re ahead of most people. I sometimes feel we’re imitations of a time where we shouldn’t be allowed to exist.”
— Charlotte Rose

Further Passages

  • “Charlotte maintained her smug, lingering stare, for she couldn’t believe what she’d heard. She put down the platter, but then with a large swoop, she pushed everything off the buffet cart onto the floor; and then she picked up the cart and tossed it out onto the balcony. The shrills and hysterics. The bangs, and dings, and the ultimate crash, were followed by a few thuds. Everyone stood in silence; Lady Catherine hid behind Grace, clutching Teddy’s diary as potential collateral. Charlotte straightened her dress — she went over to the drink cart in the corner, and poured another glass of champagne.”

    Narrator

  • “Mary used to love the word affair, in relation to some grand gathering she planned or to describe some weekend in the country that went terribly wrong. She hid, frozen but listening. That’s when the gun went off.”

    Narrator

  • “His mother handed him his dance card, already filled out. How incredibly annoying. He paused as he glanced at the card and then at his mother. Surely she didn’t mean that Teddy had to dance with Harrison? But why would he do his opening waltz with a boy who was at war? And for someone he didn’t even know!”

    Narrator

  • “Tomorrow, such a throwaway word. Tomorrow, maybe they’d go dancing. Tomorrow. But they still had that day. Life, what a funny little cycle.”

    Narrator

  • “But it was different when they got older; those were just little bends of the truth. His chess pieces and dolls grew up to have their own eyes, ears, and brains.”

    Narrator

  • “They hid from each other, the truth, and the light.”

    Narrator

  • “The past was thought to be seen in the clearest of lights because he understood the most to reflect on it. That, and it was so easy to make up how he saw the past; he manifested what he wanted to see.”

    Narrator

  • “He really was a living oxymoron. But it was better to have the oxy prefix than to just be moronic; he was quite sharp but did not see himself as foolish.”

    Narrator

  • “Stop thinking, always thinking, racing, it never stops — get lost in the moment if you can, but make it stop. Everything matters, but nothing matters now. Not now."

    Charlotte Rose


  • “Intellectuals have always been partial to GRANDIOSE ideas about themselves: Such intellectuals, bristling with neurotic aspirations and DERANGED by FANTASIES of utopia, were made possible by the very society they would destroy.”

    Mrs. Fairfax


  • “There in that room, nothing else mattered. The triangles of scorn, the circles of tedious alliances, and the past, all were momentarily dissolved. ”

    Narrator

  • “Harrison swallowed a gulp of nerves. “I’m sorry I’m rambling. I just thought of the letters I wrote to you before we were married. Afterward, I just assumed that you knew how I felt; how terribly wrong of me. Teddy, I, I’ll love you always, as I do now, both in this life and the next. What a blessed miracle it is that you’re my husband.”

    Harrison Archibald

  • “The future would cease; their future would become Teddy’s future with Harrison. William just looked at Teddy — his profile, his face under that helmet with the sun behind him, the gloves covering his dainty hands, and the same trails to ride — to forget; he’d go back and keep living.”

    Narrator

  • “Any kind of love is the slowest form of dying, at a lifelong pace.”

    Teddy Madison