journalist, television critic, novelist, writer, screenwriter, film critic, film screenwriter
1971
A theme that has always interested me is how women express anger, how women express violence. That is very much part of who women are, and it's so unaddressed. A vast amount of literature deals with cycles of violence about men, antiheroes. Women lack that vocabulary.
I grew up in the '80s where there's a lot of these kind of post-apocalyptic, post-comet, post-whatever it was, so that always captured my imagination a lot as a little kid, that idea of getting access to secret places and being able to roam around where you're not supposed to.
How confusing to live in the shadow of a shadow.
It is always consoling to think of suicide;
I wanted to make it clear that the show’s about a matriarchy. I wanted it to be clear that power can be ugly, and a matriarchy is just as ugly as a patriarchy. It may look a little different, but power is bloody.
…I also wanted to make sure no one tried to make her “save the cat.” To me, Camille is an inherently kind person despite everything that’s happened to her. And you see that when you walk through the day with Camille. You see how she treats people. But she’s not running around saving babies and kittens just so the audience can be sure she’s a good person.
I think there’s a deep societal fear of female rage, partly because it hasn’t been experienced a lot. Men—I speak in vast generalities—are often very afraid of what they don’t know how to handle. And they haven’t had to handle female rage a lot, and they think they need to handle it.
It’s incredibly misogynist to tell me I can only write a certain type of woman. Because that’s saying women must be a certain type of person. That puts us back to the Stone Age—like women are saints and therefore not human and if we stray beyond that model, we’ll be severely punished. It denies us any humanity. It doesn’t even bother me. It just bounces off me. It’s such a ridiculous notion that my novels are misogynist because I don’t write the kind of women you want.
If you are someone who reads books to feel like you have a friend on the page, my book is not going to be the book for you…I write for people who are readers the way I'm a reader. I don't care if I dislike a character; I care if I find them interesting or they make me laugh, or if I'm trying to figure them out. I am always more interested in that.
I'd developed an inability to demonstrate much negative emotion at all. It was another thing that made me seem like a dick - my stomach could be all oiled eels, and you would get nothing from my face and less from my words. It was a constant problem: too much control or no control at all.
She blew more smoke toward me, a lazy game of cancer catch.