From Movies to Memoirs with Guinevere Turner

Hi everyone and welcome back to the Art-O-Log. I'm so excited to share today's episode. Not only are we gonna get some fantastic advice, I get to share an interview with one of my favorite living writers, guinevere Turner. Her work came into my life a couple of years ago when I found this film from 1994 called Go Fish, which was actually restored in 4K this year because it's the 30th anniversary. This black and white movie about a group of lesbians living in Chicago changed what I thought that life, film and art could look like and swiftly prompted me to watch everything and read everything Guinevere. Most recently, I read her heart-wrenching memoir called when the World Didn't End, which came out last year. In it, turner recounts her tumultuous childhood, growing up in the Lyman family cult, and relays her story with a mature voice that retains her childhood innocence.

You may know her as the co-screenwriter for the film adaptation of Brett Easton Ellis' novel American Psycho, but that's only one part of her incredible career. She's a writer, director and actor who's been working in film and TV since Go Fish, which she also helped write, produce and direct. She teamed up with director Mary Herron to write the films American Psycho, the Notorious Betty Page and the 2019 film, charlie Says. She was a writer and editor on Showtime's the L Word and played the recurring character of Gabby DeVoe. She's written and directed seven short films, two of which have premiered at Sundance Film Festival. She can be seen in films such as the Watermelon Woman, chasing Amy and American Psycho. Her latest screenplay, charlie Says, was directed by Mary Harron and opened in theaters and digital platforms of May of 2019.

Guinevere is taught screenwriting at Sarah Lawrence Columbia, the University of Georgia, ucla and now Syracuse University. She wrote an essay for the New Yorker in April of 2019 and then expanded that essay into a memoir which was published by Random House in the summer of 2023. Her next collaboration with Mary Herron is a feature called the Highway that Eats People, and it's in pre-production. Guinevere welcome to the show. Hello Madison, could you introduce yourself for people who may be unfamiliar with your work?

Yes, I am Gwenna Beer-Turner. I am an actor. I'm not saying these in any particular order of most important, because I do a lot of things. I'm an actor, I am a screenwriter, filmmaker, I'm a professor of practice in film at Syracuse University and I last year gosh, last year, almost a year ago I wrote a book. I wrote a book for a couple of those years, but last year it came out. So, author, poet, no, not a poet, but predominantly, I am a writer of various kinds.

What are some of your earliest memories of writing?

I started keeping a diary when I was nine. Unfortunately, I don't have that one, and I can picture the shelf that I left it on in the house in LA when I was young. We had to, so I grew up in this cult that's what my book is about and we had to write letters to the leader about the music that he would put out, and so we were taught to be critics at a young age and I found that stressful. But I loved writing in my diary, even though I knew people would read it, and so that also became a performative piece of writing, even though I had to pretend that it wasn't, which is complex layers. So writing has always been complex, but I really, the minute I got a diary, I just I think that's.

I was like oh, this feels like I was just put in the right body of water, although when I started writing my book, I was like, oh my God, this is so fun, I can do whatever I want are no rules, and I'm not. You're writing a screenplay, even if you make it yourself. It's gonna be different, because different things happen or different people bring different things to the characters or to the room, but the book is just. I'm like it's, this is the thing, this is the it's and it's all me and I can do whatever I want. Obviously I had an editor and there's lots and lots of editing and rewriting and all like that, but it was really um thrilling. I was like have I been doing the wrong thing? For decades I've written short pieces that are narrative, that were I studied fiction in college. Fiction I don't think is my thing If even my screenplays that have been made into movies are adaptations or based on true stories or Go Fish is an exception. Actually, I was talking about what was around me.

Speaking of Go Fish and writing screenplays. Can you tell me more about the experience of writing and acting in Go Fish and how you came up for the outline of the film?

In a very haphazard way. We thought we were making a short film and then we would think of a scene and we'd be like, oh, let's shoot that. And then we were just having so much fun. At first, independent film was a relatively new concept in the early 90s and I had never been on a film set before. I was just learning about how all these things work and writing it with Rose and then rewriting it, and it just kept getting bigger and bigger until we were finally like, wow, I guess we're making a feature film.

And then right somewhere in there is when we broke up and continued to try to make this movie together and it was not a, it was not a pretty breakup. I cheated on her, so she hated me and I hated her back and we would fight horribly in front of everyone and it was just a hot mess and she would do things like there's a line that is still in the movie that she told the actor to say specifically to piss me off. It's in one of the talking heads things. And she's going. She says something like I've never got, you know, stuck on a tree and like made love on a tree and that got. The sentence is really long and it's not what I wrote. And she, rose told her she made it longer and I was like Rose, that is terrible. This is supposed to be boom, that sort of ruins the rhythm of the scene. And she was like I don't care, I'm the director. And I was like Lynn, what am I doing here? She goes, I don't know. That's the level of shittiness we were to each other. We're family, we're good friends, we can tell these stories and laugh.

So it was hard. It was hard and if you look at the dailies because it's shot on film you'll see me. I'm playing Max, this sort of happy, gullicky character. And then you hear Rose Colcutt and I'm like how's that Rose With a mean face just looking at her, so just like ready to be. It's just such a sharp contrast between the characters. So like light and happy-go-lucky, lucky for us, all of a sudden, when the film was bought at Sundance, we were at distribution and we were all over the world together and like something about the success and also that we were in so many new situations over and over. Where we were, all we had was each other. We still get on each other's nerves, but we've had and we had a lot of fun actually, because we both we worked on the L word together for two seasons. That was really fun.

Did you know that you had something so special in your hands when you were making it?

We didn't. It still surprises me that a new generation of people women mostly watch it and respond to it. When we saw it at Sundance, there was like a 19-year-old girl who was like on the verge of tears afterwards in Brazil and she was just like I feel like this movie is speaking directly to me and we were just like well, how, so? No, and I really I especially could never have predicted how well it did at the time, but I especially couldn't have predicted that it would be so well-loved 30 years later. That part is really amazing. I've been talking more about it since the print came out than I have in years and I've been trying to think about what it is Like. Why does it speak to a generation when it's just very analog? Do you know what I mean? Like our clothes are very dated. It's so weird how you don't know that you look like you're from the era that you're in until it's over. You know what I mean, but we look so 90s and that was how we really dressed. Although I did not wear a baseball backward baseball hat every day of my life, I really that's the only thing I would have changed. There's only two scenes in the whole movie where I'm not wearing that hat. What I think that why it lasts, is that it's pure in a way that nothing we do ever will be again, because we we really we weren't thinking about careers and we weren't obviously weren't making any money, we just really made it because we wanted it to exist. And I feel like that kind of purity, that sincerity, really shines through in the movie, that we're just and we're not talking to anyone but ourselves, to to our community, and in this very kind of in a way that I think also really like when we, when the film first came out, people were like they thought it was improv, they thought it was like a documentary and it was all very scripted, but it and it took us a while to convince people like no, we didn't just have this one thing in us, like we're just storytellers, we're filmmakers. We got plenty more where that came from, but it wasn't interesting because we were at Sundance with Go Fish the same time that Kevin Smith was there with his first movie, clerks and his literally black and white movie, very talky, blah, blah, blah. They're like yin and yang of each other and represented by the same person. We got distribution before kevin, but his career took off and ours didn't, and we were like, oh, we're girls, we're queer girls. This sucks. It sucks. That he made the movie is just so similar in many ways. He's less experimental than ours and he just that was all they needed. I'm like. They're like oh, you're a straight man, let's go. We've been shitty with each other about that. We got into a fight once about that, me and Kevin. This conversation is making it sound like I get into it. I don't.

What was your favorite scene to shoot? There's one. There's a sequence in the middle where it's just everybody leading their daily lives. I'm like walking with a walkman coming out of some store and BS has a dog and because she's not going to wear, she's wearing a chef's coat to be a vet. But whatever, in real life she's a chef.

I never noticed it until she just said it when we were at Sundance. She was like, why am I wearing a chef? Because I never noticed it until she just said it when we were at sunday and she was like, why am I wearing a chef's coat? Um, and it's this great montage that ends with t wendy, who plays kia, saying somebody saying look at that fucking diet. And she's like, oh cute, and that's my favorite. That's my favorite piece of the movie because it's I think it might be the only piece that's exactly how I wrote it and that's it's exactly what I wanted it to be like. That never, that hardly ever happens, because there are so many factors that change things, but in that case I just find it very moving for some reason when I was watching it, I felt as though the film was a love letter to both cinema and the lesbian community.

Yeah yeah. It was weird because in doing press for the movie in that first round, people felt really entitled to ask us really personal questions, like about lesbians and sex, and we would just be like, what about that movie gave you permission to talk to me like that, like I'm not going to talk to you about my sex life, or anyone's actually read a book before the Internet?

Yeah, I think that a lot of people feel entitled to speak to artists about their personal lives when their work deals with matters of sex and sexuality, and I think it's something that happened particularly to women. I've seen so many press runs of people just asking the most inappropriate questions to women that they would never ask men and not even talk about the art itself.

Yeah, and again treating us like we had made a documentary, not that we had actually crafted this.

There's a lot of very cinema-y things in that movie, so even though I could talk about Go Fish forever, I want to move on to talk about American Psycho. This film that you wrote with Mary Harron has been reaching new audiences since it was released about 20 years ago, and I was wondering what about the film do you think has resonated with so many people, and why does it continue to stay relevant today? It's interesting that movie.

Because now I teach undergraduates here and they all, of course, know it and love it and at some point I said, what is it to my students, how is it that you are all love this movie? That was made before you were born and this and I was. I realized it was like fishing for compliments. I was expecting to be like that's a timeless piece of blah, blah, blah. This one girl just goes memes. There's like tons of memes and if you don't know what it is, then you're going to watch it, because then you won't understand the memes. I was like okay, it's a meme-able movie.

I think we were writing about toxic masculinity before that term had been coined. I think Christian's performance is also that term had been coined. I think Christian's performance is also. Christian himself got so famous after that movie doing a bunch of different things that it also lives, because I think people saw Batman or saw the Machinist and then they go back and what else did Christian Bale do? So it's Christian. I think has a lot to do with it. Christian's just really famous and he's just a joy to watch do anything. It's incredible. I was watching him in the Dick Cheney movie and I literally forgot it was him, like he can disappear inside a role like no other, I don't know.

And it was not loved when it first came out. It took about 10 years for it to be connoisseurized. I feel like a generation of people got old enough to watch it and they got it, but my generation didn't really get it, especially women. And I have had many women say to me that 10 years later they would say, oh, I never saw the movie because I was like, oh, it's just violence against women. Who wants to watch that?

But then I watched it and it's actually a feminist movie. I'm like, so for the last 10 years you've thought I was a charlatan hack out here putting exploitive movies on women's bodies, and that's what you thought of me. I'm like, look at the film I did before that. Does that seem like something I would do? It's just they're funny as companions Go Fish and American Psycho because they have such passionate fans, both of them and those two people don't. They could not be a more different set of people. So I'd be like most people who love go fish, I've never seen american psycho, and definitely all the bros who love american psycho.

I've never seen go fish I think it's so interesting, this misunderstanding that's come up for people who've been watching the film, because it's had this reputation for being, you know, a quote-unquote film, bro film for so long that people didn't even realize it was written by women and directed by a woman, and they didn't even realize it was written by women and directed by women and they didn't even understand what the movie was really getting at.

This all feels terribly Gen Z, but in my experience it feels like my generation are very interested in this idea of productivity and optimization and we're all kind of preoccupied with this content that's being produced by young people where, rather than pointing the camera away from ourselves and being interested in the world around us, we're pointing the camera towards ourselves and we're making these get ready with me videos and we're obsessed with being quote unquote.

That girl, or you know even this trend of looks maxing, which I don't even know how genuine it is, but it feels like it's everywhere right now, which I don't even know how genuine it is, but it feels like it's everywhere right now. So the way that American Psycho put forward this idea of how this character gets ready and how it's almost laughable, this beauty regimen almost feels expected these days. So you feel as though you're not taking care of yourself if you don't have this 11 step beauty regimen or things like that. But my point is when this film was made, the scene was, but now it feels like we're actually behaving that way, in a performative, yet earnest way.

We talk about it all the time, mary and I. How weird and meta it is that some of the film's biggest, most passionate fans are the ones we're making fun of, like the number of bros who just start like reciting that the morning routine monologue to me and I'm just like, wow, this is happening to me again. I can't believe it. Or when I was younger, too, people wouldn't believe me. I took it off my resume because I would go into an audition and literally a casting director, but you wrote American Psycho. I'm like how crazy would I have to be to put that on my resume if I was not true? That is a very specific thing. And so I just took it off because I just didn't. Nobody believed me. People, dudes, bros wouldn't believe me either. Until I got older. That's insane. Anyway, I was young. I was young and nobody, and I was struggling to have people take me seriously as a writer because just because I'm pretty, I don't know. You know what I mean.

Yeah, definitely. I think my favorite scene or one of my favorite scenes from that movie is the business card scene.

People love that there have been so many hilarious parodies made of that scene that just there was a British jeans commercial there was. My favorite was these like Canadian high school boys I think high school made a shot for shot spoof of it, but with sloppy jokes it was hilarious. Fun fact about that scene is that the word acquisitions is misspelled on every single card. Was that intentional? No, we didn't notice it ever. Like the internet noticed it 10 years later and we were like holy shit, how did we not notice that? And Ricky Gideon, the production designer, who is a good friend of Mary's, we're just like epic fail.

Oh, my gosh, that is hilarious, and I'm so embarrassed that I have never noticed that.

What I love, too about that scene is that in the script it says that Patrick breaks into a sweat. That is not fake sweat. Christian Bale can break into a sweat if you need him to. That was just like and not even not a lot of sweat, just a slight sheave. It's really.

I was just like wow, that's incredible to have such control over your body. Oh my goodness, I know so as a writer yourself.

What was it like adapting someone else's writing, and for a new format it was a real challenge, especially with that book, and I was not nearly as experienced as I am now obviously. So I was. I might've been in a little bit over my head, but I learned a lot by doing it. The book is so much more graphically violent and graphically sexual than the movie is like it looks like a Disney movie compared to the book, and so that was really hard. It was hard to read. I'm like a big scaredy cat. I don't like scary things, I don't like horror movies. I had had to slog through that and then. But then also it's very funny. The book and, you know, a lot of the funny things in the movie are directly from the book.

Our biggest challenge actually was that we were obsessed with the hilarious book record CD reviews, music reviews but in the book they are just chapters. There's no action, there's no context. It's just him ranting about Phil Collins or Huey Lewis or I forget there's more that aren't in the movie when he is in it, which is in the movie, and we're like but this is so brilliant and so incredibly nerdy, Like we, we got to find a way. So that was a big breakthrough when we realized, oh, he's going to. Once he starts talking about music. He's going to kill you. It's just. This is his kind of foreplay for murder. We were very proud of that and then it was.

We had a lot of conversations about not wanting to have graphic violence after graphic violence, but also not wanting to appear like ladies who are just too scared to do that, and striking that balance. And that's why there's that one scene when he chases her with a chainsaw. Because, Mary's, you know what I want to do? Just one classic horror movie trope and just make it weird. Because it's weird because he drops in on her from so far away and it kills her. But she's just so that everybody knows I can, I'm capable of it, I just that's not what I'm doing with this movie, but let me just give them a taste. There it is. Now let me just go back to my political satire.

So, even though they're both very different films, both Go Fish and American Psycho were collaborative writing experiences for you. How does collaboration impact your process as a writer? I really like it.

I'm really with Rose. It was rocked. She denies it to this day, but she wanted that movie to end with a gay bashing Go fish, yeah. And I was like, no, that's like the opposite of what we're doing here. It's not a tortured gay story, it's a happy gay story with little dumb problems that are just regular people problems. You know, and Rose and I we don't. We just fight a lot, just as people.

We didn't fight when we worked on the L Word. We were two, we were more grown up, but back then we fought a lot and so I couldn't tell sometimes if she was just suggesting something, because she knew I would hate it and she just wanted to fight with me. But then we had a lot of fun writing together on the L Word. But then with Mary it's just. We're raising money right now for our fourth film that we wrote together, that she's directing, and we just have. From the minute we met and started talking, we just have a. Really we just, we're just. We think the same things are funny. We, we don't. There's no ego in our conversation. So if one of us says something and the other one doesn't think it's a bad idea, doesn't think it's a good idea can say that without it being a criticism or without needing to get defensive. We just really click and it's hard. I wrote, we wrote America's Echo when she was again eight months pregnant and then we wrote Notorious Betty Page when she had two little kids. That part was hard. That was hard Writing with someone who has little kids who are now in their early 20s and give great notes. But Mary and I just have that we just find the same things. Funny is really what it boils down to. Sometimes I'll find a board to be laughing about something and I'll be like we look so dark right now. Our next movie, again, is not. It is in no way a comedy, but it still makes us laugh. Same thing with Charlie Says when we did that movie. That movie is not funny, but there's certain things in it that just crack us up. It has to do with Matt's performance, it has to do with just I don't know just various little details that make us laugh.

I never was always like whatever you do, yeah, but I'm very collaborative by nature, but finding someone that you can collaborate with is it's like dating. I feel very lucky that I found someone to work with at this level and I feel not very pleased that even after all, especially her career, all the films she's done, all the TV she's done, all the success she's had, that people are just handing her money. You know what I mean. She is 70 years old. She has made, she's directed like 28 things I think she has credit for. She is obviously talented, she'll do a good job, she'll make an incredible movie. Still, I guess just it never. I guess it just never gets easier.

And for us right now, because of the actor strike and the writer's strike and everything, is everybody's very risk averse. It's hard, but I like this one I wanted to get me. She told me that bjork's daughter auditioned for it and bjork's daughter said this is the movie my generation has been waiting for. What's this movie going to be about? It's I'll talk about it to anyone who will listen, because I want me it is.

It's the first film that where we've done that's not a period piece it's about.

It follows four teenagers who are outcasts of the foster care system, so they're just living off the ground and living in the woods and they're just kind of menaces to society who smash up 7-Elevens and chug cough syrup and they're just, they're feral creatures and it's about them and their story and a serial killer who is stalking them which is based on kind of the Green River Killer in the Pacific Northwest who very much preyed on homeless kids. And it's weirdly, it's fun, as that serial killer you know preyed on prostitutes. They were homeless kids who were hooking. You know what I mean. Like it's just a kind of different spin on it. It's not like he wasn't, he was just looking for vulnerable people who nobody would notice if they disappeared, and so it's about that. It's about chosen family. It's two of the two of the four kids are a couple boys. They find an off the grid community and a huge part of the takes place in where they join the community and just they're just not really very good at being more normal and they just fuck everything up.

And it makes us laugh.

It's called the Highway that Eats People and it is based on a book that's called the Orange Eats Creeps. That is a stream of consciousness kind of plotless, willfully obtuse, cool book so we created, we did a lot with the adaptation, but it is based on a book that I recommend because it's just a cool kind of fever dream stream of consciousness like craziness. There's so much cool stuff in that book that we couldn't find in the movie, we couldn't find a place for in the movie, including the concept of raccoons, where there's like a whole population of homeless kids who hibernate for the winter and they just drink tons of cough syrup and sleep for the whole winter and then other people's jobs bathe them while they're passed out. I don't know if it's real, but it's just so cool and weird. I was like Mary, I want to put this in the movie. She's like I feel like it's a whole other movie, like we need to make a movie just about that. I'm like okay.

Speaking of books, your autobiography when the World Didn't End is about your childhood, growing up in the Lyman family. What made you decide to write about yourself rather than other people, and how did you prepare to release something so personal into the world?

Ooh, I don't know if I'm prepared. I don't know if I did so. We were Mary and I had just finished a film that we did, called Charlie Says, which is about the Manson family. It's about the women who killed Raymond and their time in prison talking about brainwashing. And I suddenly realized, oh damn, people like enterprising journalists often will ask me about my childhood and I have gotten so good at avoiding talking about it because it's so off topic and it's such a big topic. But then I was like, damn it, mary, I feel we're going to spend this entire press junket talking about my childhood because it is relevant to this movie is I did bring a lot of my personal experience and knowledge into the some of the more subtle things that that make this movie feel real. And but I was like but oh, I know how it is. When I start talking about it, people can never get enough of it and then it can derail an afternoon. You know what I mean. Like it's, which is why I don't talk about it that much. Well, well, I didn't know.

There was a book. I was like, hey, read the book. And she said why don't you write something about it and try to get it out there, control the narrative. So why, said one? I was like, oh yeah, yeah, I wish you'd said that to me sooner. And so I did. And, lucky for me, wild places. And that was. I had a knot, like a painful knot in my stomach for weeks, writing that I was there, was some part of me was so afraid to tell that story because I just didn't want them to hate me. And that was really interesting. And then nobody died and maybe some people did hate me for it and some people thanked me for it. And then I felt and then the essay itself, which you can find online they called it my Childhood in a Cult, which is a title I would have given it that spawned interest in a book deal and I have tried to write this book.

I literally tried in my 20s, 30s and 40s. Each time and I'm like, oh no, not ready, can't do it, don't know what I'm going to say, don't know how I'm going to tackle it. And then I was like, okay, you know what I think. I'm old enough, I'm like mature enough, I have a perspective and the time is now. Like this sort of all organically happened, like now I really it's time, I need to do it and I did and it was hard.

And there's that part of me that just really doesn't want to be seen as a trauma survivor or survivor of any kind or that cult lady or all of those things, because people are interested in cults in this way. That is a bit alienating and marginalizing. I feel like in popular culture right now we're saturated with cults cult documentaries in particular particular, and cult books to a degree, um, and I didn't want to be in that, like I didn't want to sell myself in that way, um, but it was just time and so I did it. And, uh, now I'm actually working on the adaptation and discovering that story is very hard to squeeze into a feature film, like very hard.

I just started doing it, just writing it and thinking about page count, and it's over 100 pages, that I'm only 12. Wow, and but it's really hard to get tv made right now because I thought, oh, maybe it wants to be a limited series and my manager and the producer working with have said feature films are easier to get made right now than TV. I'm like, how can I fit this into 100 pages? There's so much story and it's so complicated. If you don't understand this part, then you won't understand why this is like this.

I'm like can it be a three-hour movie? What are some of the considerations?

that you had to make when you were writing about yourself versus you know, fiction. First of all, there are probably two, definitely two, maybe three things that I left out to protect people, and that was hard because I was like this is a real personality test, because these two things make the story better, like it's better, it makes more sense. And then I'm like I can't like those two people don't need to know these things, that it will hurt and it will do damage, and so I have to sacrifice the artist. The artist in me has to take a back seat to the human, to the, the empathetic human. I was very conscious of not of trying trying to not make anyone a villain, even though obviously some clear villains emerge. I just tried really hard to give everyone humanity, and that was hard. And then just writing about trauma is hard. You have to in writing with anything. If you try to write about a childhood memory, you have to get in that headspace and go back there and feel it in your body. And that was hard. That was hard but I did it and I realized I was dreading writing the sort of the more harrowing scenes of abuse and that I needed to just so I wasn't writing anything for a while and then I was like jump into that cold pool, get it done. It's going to be shocking, but then it'll be done. It may have involved a bit of Pinot Grigio, write the tipsy version and then be like, okay, now the second is sober, you got it out, now make it good. Yeah, the people who I cared the most about reading my book are my siblings, the ones who are in the book. I have two other brothers who I didn't know yet, that are not in the book but because it's especially for my younger brother and sister, it's really the story of their parents and I didn't want them to be mad at me, or I just was afraid they would be mad at me, and they weren't at all. They weren't. So that was. And then the rest is I trained myself to not worry about whatever what anyone else thinks, because I know in my bones that I've written something true my generation.

One of the main criticisms they have of me and the book is that I was too easy on them, that I was too easy on the Lyman family, because I and I do know that things got really tough after I was gone and there was a lot of violence and a lot of drinking and stuff and I'm like I didn't. First of all, I didn't go that easy on him. You may have lost perspective on the story that we're telling here. It's very weird and illegal most of it, and second of all, I wasn't there. For that part, I didn't. That'm not at all. I am not. I look okay because I accomplished some things, but that doesn't mean that I'm emotionally healthy. I am okay. I'm doing a lot better than some of the women I grew up with, that's for sure. But the reason that question surprises me is because I talk in the book about being able to, about being mad at myself for being able to seem so okay when I'm not. I literally talk about and then people say that to me and I'm like I'm not okay. Don't make me say that to you, I am. That was. I had a really hard childhood. I don't know if you read about it, but like I'm baggage and one of them is that I'm capable of seeming like I'm absolutely okay when I'm not. That's just a survival skill.

I read a life changing book right after I finished my book called what my Bones Know. It's incredible. It's written by a woman named Stephanie Fu, who's a journalist, an NPR journalist, for several outlets, but it's about her own trauma and she, in her journalist way, goes on a journey to fix it or to try everything from mushrooms to different kinds of experimental therapy, to confronting her parents, to everything. And she's such a great writer. The book is such a revelation to me of who I am and how my trauma manifests itself, and I highly recommend it. I recommend it to everyone. I gave it to my sister and she was like I don't feel that she read it. She was like, oh yeah, I see myself in there. I'm like we did have a dramatic childhood. You did too. It was different from mine, but it was. It was not easy, it's been, it's actually.

I was really resistant to any implication that I was doing this, writing this book, for some kind of catharsis, but it led me to that book, which was actually a catharsis. I didn't. I don't want to be seen that way, like it's not just public, a public therapy session, so much so that I resist it. I resist saying that I evolved at all from it. But one thing I did, one thing I can feel, is that I let go of those memories. It's like I relaxed I wasn't been holding on to this story forever and aggressively being like I will never forget, I won't forget, I can forget. I wrote it down. It's a relief it's out there and it's not. I don't, it's not inside me anymore and I feel like that. There's something really healthy about that in a way.

No, I totally get that and I feel like writing about yourself and then releasing that into the world is just a new level of vulnerability in your career to have, which I just think is incredible. And obviously you know I loved your book and you've had so many accomplishments under your belt. At this point I have to know what have been some of the highlights. The experience of getting letters.

It's pre-internet right. I had boxes and boxes of letters from all over the world from young women who had seen the movie and who said it changed their lives. Boxes of letters from all over the world from young women who had seen the movie and who said it changed their lives. That was incredible. You can make something that changes people's lives. Like people were like it's how I came out to my grandma, it's how I realized I was gay. I made my mom watch it so she would understand me better. Like really just really cool. That was just really cool and it was. I was like, wow, this is powerful. Like the ability to write and to represent people who feel underrepresented is very powerful, very thrilling in a way. So I loved that. I loved.

I did a movie as an actor, a British film called Preaching to the Perverted, which is like a can't be and unintentionally can't be in some ways, a movie in which I play a dominatrix, but like a club diva, like outfits and fetish world. I'm actually dominatrix and I have a whole household of people and it was just so fun. I was there before anyone else me and the makeup artist, because my hair and makeup is insane, just like cones of braids and like crazy glitter and it was just really. It was actually exhausting after a while to have that much hair and makeup every day, but I just looked really cool and I made some lifelong friends so I loved that. I loved working on the L Word. That was really. It was my first and only so far time working in TV and it was exciting. It's exciting that you're like writing something in May and it's going to be on TV in December. And it was extra exciting to work on the second season because then I knew the actors and knew what they were good at and it was like just fun to be like oh, what should we do with this character? It's so different from writing a movie and it's fast. You've got to crank it out.

And I was a story editor too. So I was a story editor too, so I was reading other people's scripts and rewriting people's scripts and I loved the pace of it all and being in a writer's room with the same people for 10 hours a day for weeks on end. That actually made me crazy, but it was also fun. I just I have a I obsess over people's mannerisms and when you're with the same people in a room for that. Well, at that up close, I would just be like, oh my God, just going to do it, just going to do it. I'd be like have you ever noticed that blah, blah, blah does blah, blah, blah, no Watch? And I'd be like that's the time.

Just obsessively noticing people's habits, because people are weirdos and if you watch one person for a long time, you'll just notice all the weird stuff that they don't even realize you're doing Myself included, I'm sure. So that was really fun. What other career highlights Charlie Says was really? That was an exceptional experience for me because that script is not co-written by me and Mary, it's just written by me. And then Mary came on as a director later on with her notes and stuff. I did rewrites, but she, because of that and because that one involved tons of research and really specific details, I was just sitting right next to her in her director's chair and she was asking me what did you think? We got it and I was right in every single step of the way and production designs were coming to me like would this be hanging on the wall? Blah, blah, blah, and that was really fun. It was really just so satisfying to me Because in the other two movies that we've done together I came back.

I didn't really because my job was done and I wasn't in the movie. I was in American Psycho. So I was there for that, but I didn't stay for the whole thing. I regret that actually, but with Charlie I was in American Psycho, so I was there for that, but I didn't stay for the whole thing. I regret that actually, but with Charlie I was there for every single decision, every step of the way, and it was really thrilling Because she would allow me to rewrite while we were shooting. So I would see something or hear something from one of the actors or just see the space and realize, oh, we should do this, we should capitalize on this.

Yeah, the script supervisor was like I have never. I have never. They should like cause in screenwriting, I mean in in production, like you change the color of the pages if they're new and there's an order. So so she's. I've never gotten to salmon before. I loved that.

Uh, other career highlights I'm really looking forward to this if we can get it together in writing, because writing it has been really fun and I'm really curious to see if these two old ladies can write teenagers convincingly. Her daughters think so. They're in their early 20s. I think we did it and it's just going to be exciting to have it be a period piece. We've put so much energy and research and meticulousness and the language of a time period and the aesthetics, and so that's the next career highlight? I don't know. I don't know. Somebody needs to give us money.

Other amazing things have happened to me too. It's long. I mean Go Fish came out when I was 26. So that was 30 years ago, obviously, and a lot has happened. I really. I also really can't wait to for the weird experience of turning my book into cinema. That's just going to be really weird. Who is going to play me? I'm so mad that I'm too old to play my mom Because she's like in her 30s. I'm like that would have been good. Shia LaBeouf did that and it was really cool. Yeah, did you see that? In Honey Boy he played his dad. That's like the ultimate revenge, in a way. It's.

I'm gonna grow up and play you in a movie well, speaking of growing up, what advice would you have for someone looking to become a writer?

I think what I was talking with you about earlier, that get rid of the myth of inspiration and the muse, because those things are real and they come, but you should be writing anyway and you should be writing every day. If you want to be a writer, you should make space for it in your daily life, the way that an athlete makes space to work out every day. That there should be a place that you should figure out exactly who you are and when you're at your best. You should, regardless of your financial status, carve out a space that works for you. For some people that's cafes, which I find so mind boggling. I bet people can concentrate when there's like a million things going on all around the way. I need absolute quiet and solitude. I can't even write if someone else is in the room, and I've discovered for me that it's first thing in the morning and that I need to not engage with the internet or my phone or anything. I just need to sit down and start writing, and I do that every morning before I do anything else, and I highly encourage writers to think that way about themselves and to realize like for me, one of the things I realized is I work on a reward system. So I'm like, okay, if you write five pages, you can have a snack or a nap or a shower, and that's.

I always say that I treat my writer self like a child, like a child that needs coddling. And what does she want? How can I get her to write? So what do I need to do? What are all the things I need to do to convince her, to manipulate her into sitting in that seat and writing, because focus is really the issue for me.

I have ADD, I take medication for ADD, but it's still sometimes it's just really hard for me just to have ADD. I take medication for ADD, but it's still sometimes it's just really hard for me just to do one thing and only one thing until I'm done. So I've also just a lot of. It has to do with, I think, knowing yourself, and that's a big thing to be like okay and I'm not and not. Also, I realized don't try to change yourself. That's just a lot of energy. Just know what mess you are and learn to work around that mess. It's just far less time consuming. So it's like self-manipulation really. This is going to sound really culty when I say this, but I'm a Gemini, that's all of the thing. Everything I just said is very Gemini. I'm a Capricorn, very Capricorn. I think Everything I just said is buried Gemini. I'm a Capricorn, buried Capricorn. I think, over cheaper. Yeah, mary Herron is a Capricorn and Capricorn is my rising sign. I'm goat identified.

Well, gwinnifer, thank you so much for your time today. This has been just an incredible experience and I've loved talking to you and hearing about your book and all the other projects you've been in. It really has been a dream come true.