#a separation

Writing male characters is not very difficult because there is a vast canon of male characters written by men, for men, for any writer starting out to draw from. Finding the voice of a male character is in so many ways what a Ph.D. in American literature trains you to do. What felt, to me, more challenging was to write female characters, and so I took a little bit of time to get there. Writing female characters is something that holds so much depth and interest for me. It feels almost inexhaustible.

A Separation is one of those really great pieces of art where everyone is behaving badly and no one is behaving unreasonably that really tears at you. There are moments of kindness and generosity where you can see maybe it's possible different choices could have been made. But it's also so terrible in the moments it holds your feet to the fire and makes you look at it all spiral. All the hallmarks of a classic tragedy but it doesn't even end in something as big and shocking as a bloodbath, just a pair of very sad young girls.