Anne T. Donahue's Mad Men obsession

On nostalgia and how pop culture acts as a gateway to bigger conversations

Say hello to Canadian author and Mad Men superfan, Anne T. Donahue! Courtesy: Anne T. Donahue

I’m beyond thrilled to introduce you to this month’s Obsessed Interview guest, Anne T. Donahue.

Anne is a writer and student living in Cambridge, Ontario. She is the author of the fantastic essay collection, Nobody Cares. I’ve been a huge fan of Anne’s work for years. Her writing has made me laugh out loud, reflect and nod in recognition many, many times. It was a dream come true to meet Anne on a video call last week. We had so much fun (I had to edit out all my laughing)! I hope you’ll enjoy our conversation about her Mad Men obsession, the iconic TV show set in the 1960s about a prestigious ad agency in New York.

You can find Anne on X (formerly Twitter) and on Instagram.

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Michelle Béland: Anne, welcome! What are you obsessed with?

Anne T. Donahue: Mad Men, baby. I love it. That is a show I can rewatch and rewatch and rewatch again. And I do, although I haven’t in about a year. So it's time for another one is what I'm telling you right now. Breaking news!

MB: It’s time! What is it about the show that hooks you?

ATD: There's so many layers to the show. What I gleaned from it when I watched it in real time in the 2000s and early 2010s is very different than now, because I was in my twenties when it came out. Now, in my late thirties, I understand more and more of the complexity of the human experience and how messy it is. There's never a through line. There’s never a straightforward path. I notice different characters’ motivations. I relate to the characters differently. I like how flawed everybody is. 

Depending on where you are in your life, you find a storyline that pulls you in and whether or not it's a good thing, you begin to relate to certain narratives in a different way. I like how reflective it is of how no matter how much things change, the human condition doesn't really. 

MB: I watched the seven seasons of Mad Men when they came out on Netflix in 2015 or 2016. I was on mat leave for a year at the time and I remember, unfortunately, relating to Betty Draper.

ATD: I don't even think there's an “unfortunate” in that. There are certain characters that are absolute villains for sure, like Joan’s ex-husband, who has absolutely no redeeming qualities and is a sexual predator. But when you see somebody like Betty, she's a product of her era, a product of her class and a product of a very specific women's lens, which is white and affluent. That’s what I like so much about the show. There’s enough complexity in every character. 

Do you know how often I relate to Don? Which is not cool, but I get it. It’s easy to say that Don’s the antihero, but he’s also suffering from a lot of things, which is what makes the show so powerful because there are no villains, outside of the obvious villains. Don acts like a bad person sometimes, however as his trajectory moves forward and he becomes more complicated, you can understand that he’s also the product of a lot of other things. Don’t worry. Betty is Betty.

MB: Would you say Don Draper is your favourite character?

ATD: I don't know if he's my favorite character. Sometimes I can recognize some parallels. I find that Peggy and Don are the same, but different, so out of those two, those are the characters that I seek out the most and will retweet and quote the most if there's a screencap. I think that there’s this harder exterior shell that they both put forward, which I know I do. 

Then there's also those classic lines that you know are absolute lies, but they say in a way that's very believable. “I don't think about you at all” is a classic one where Don's actually consumed with jealousy. I would say those two, because I like to throw myself into productivity instead of acknowledging what is actually going on. That's why I like “The Suitcase” episode so much.

MB: Can you remind me what that episode is about?

ATD: It’s an episode in season four where Don knows Anna is going to die and he's waiting for the phone call from her niece, and instead of working through what all that means, he gets drunk at work and bullies Peggy. And Peggy has this really shitty boyfriend that ruins her birthday and she ends up staying with Don at the office and they spend the entire night talking. Finally he gets the phone call in the morning and it’s the first time you've ever seen Don break down. That whole episode is so relatable, because even though I know I do it, I’ll still choose to throw myself into a task instead of acknowledging something that’s painful. It’s easier. I think a lot of people do that, actually. I think that’s why we like Mad Men.

MB: Speaking of escaping reality, I want to dive into nostalgia a bit. I noticed your social media content and a lot of your work is influenced by nostalgia.

ATD: Yes.

MB: I love nostalgia too. One of the things I like about the show is the sixties setting. I love the furniture. I love the fashion. I have vintage issues of Châtelaine from the fifties and sixties, and I love flicking through them and seeing the old Mad Men style cigarette ads and the articles on how to be a good little housewife or hostess.

ATD: The nightmare pieces.

MB: Yes! I love that era but I wouldn’t want to live in that era, because it had its issues too. Can you tell me why you feel a pull towards nostalgia?

ATD: So there’s two facets here. When we get this weird nostalgic pull towards a decade we never lived in and have no real ties too, like Mad Men in this case, it's more of an aesthetic thing. We do not want to live back then as women. We don't want to live then as anyone who's not a white person. We've seen the casual racism with which that show is fluent in. And it's very heteronormative and white middle class. When we refer to that nostalgia, what we mean is we like their furniture. We think it's fun that they can smoke inside. We don't actually want to be there. We like the glamour, but the glamour actually hid a very profound ugliness. That’s a surface level thing. 

When I write about nostalgia, like the nineties and stuff when I was a kid, I think for myself, I get pulled to it because that was the last era before social media and the internet. That was the last time before you thought about how you were perceived. I remember buying a Bonne Bell lipstick and putting it on and thinking I was the shit. I had no idea of how I was perceived by other people. Of course there was a lot of ugly stuff underneath that era too, but I think sometimes we like to remember what it felt like to just exist without footnotes. 

Being a kid at the time, I was very unaware of social inequalities and political strife and all the horrible things that the more you learn about history, the more you realize it’s always been bad. I was aware of some things obviously, but you have this very specific lens that you’re seeing everything through. Nostalgia is a very naive filter that you can tap into. I think we all grew up quite fast after the internet became a mainstay and we can never go back to that. You don't want to unlearn everything you've learned. I don’t think you even want to go back to being thirteen, that would actually be a nightmare. But it’s the idea of a different time, which is what I think nostalgia is. Or, as Don Draper would say, it’s a carousel that can bring you home again.

Nostalgia… it’s delicate, but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek, nostalgia literally means ‘the pain from an old wound.’ It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards… it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel, it’s called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels; around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.
Don Draper on the Kodak Carousel slide projector (S1E13)

MB: I watched the episode you’re referring to yesterday, “The Wheel,” and I felt like crying. 

ATD: You could have. I wouldn’t have judged you. Harry Crane was crying. He runs out of the office in tears as we recall.

MB: That’s true! It’s such an iconic monologue.

ATD: Nostalgia is kind of that reminder to stay in the moment. I would have liked to have been appreciative of being thirteen when my big summer goal was to get all the stickers I could in the reading program at the library. There’s an irony to nostalgia. You’re going to be nostalgic for these days too. Well, maybe not these days specifically because of the horrors unfolding before our very eyes, but you know what I mean.

MB: How does your Mad Men obsession show up in your life?

ATD: I quote it so much. Even in therapy yesterday I referred to something Don Draper said. I remember a big “aha” moment was when my therapist said she watched Mad Men and could understand my reference. It felt like I could speak a new language to her! Don makes so many observations, most of which are through his super narcissistic lens, but there’s some gold in there. 

When you can’t articulate something on your own yet, you’ll use pop culture as that gateway into what you’re trying to say. So if I’m trying to say I feel a certain way, sometimes it’s easier to refer to something Don Draper did. It’s a bonding tool, it illuminates exactly where you are because people remember that scene. That’s why I like pop culture in general. Movies and TV are gateways to big conversations about much bigger things. Mad Men does that for me, so instead of having to say it, I can give a nod to Joan saying she wants to burn a place down.

MB: Last question. If you were an ad executive from the sixties to the present, what would be your dream account?

ATD: The Gap from the nineties. The campaign with “everybody in vests”, “everybody in cargos” and “everybody in khakis”. The fun of that campaign triggered something in me at that time. It’s almost like when you see a celebrity and want to be like them. For me it was Julia Roberts in Stepmom…. She was so cool. Watching those Gap commercials made me feel the same way.

When you think about it, advertising cigarettes is so funny in a horrifying way. I would have liked to have been in the room for that. I’d love to hear the conversations. I don’t know if I would want to create anything as much as I would like to go back in time and hear the justification behind a lot of things. One of my favourite Mad Men quotes is when Don says in the first episode “People want to be told so badly what to do that they’ll listen to anybody.” How do you decide what they want to be told? It’s like the 1998 Gap ad. Why did you decide that this was the approach to these staples? Everybody has khakis! Everybody has vests! Why did we need them so badly? It’s such an interesting industry to me because it plays so much on the psychology behind people. And we’ve not outgrown it. It’s always one step ahead.

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Thank you so much Anne!

Watch the Mad Men nostalgia/carousel scene that made me emotional here.

Remember the Gap commercials from the nineties? Everybody in khakis! Everybody in cords!

See you next week.