On Storytelling & The Human Condition

On Storytelling & The Human Condition

Booker Prize-winning Novelist PAUL LYNCH
Author of Prophet Song · Beyond the Sea · Red Sky in the Morning

We narrate the story of our lives to ourselves. We narrate it in linear fashion. And I know many writers have played with time in all sorts of amazing ways, but we're storytellers. This is what we do. And if you give the brain a story, a prepackaged story, you're giving a cheesecake. That's what it wants. That's why it loves stories. That's why our society is just built on stories. Politics is nothing but stories. Everything you do in the evenings – we sit down, we're watching Netflix – just stories. We consume them all the time. We are just machines for belief.

Art, Performance & the Illusion of Agency

Art, Performance & the Illusion of Agency

with KATIE KITAMURA · Author of Audition
Intimacies · A Separation

I'm really interested in the formal aspect of characters who are channeling language, who are speaking the words of other people, and in characters who are aware of how little agency they actually have, who have passivity forced upon them, who perhaps even embrace their passivity to a certain extent but eventually seek out where they can enact their agency.

Female Desire · Sex & Intimacy

Female Desire · Sex & Intimacy

Emmy-nominated Producer, Writer, Playwright LAURA EASON on THREE WOMEN

I think the show conveys to the women watching that their lives matter. They don't have to be some gorgeous aspirational person, although Sloane absolutely fits that mold. But for others living in the Midwest, struggling and feeling unseen, hopefully, the mirrors of Lina and Maggie will help them not feel so alone and remind them that their stories are important and matter.