The dark screen loomed above me as I craned my neck to see. Searching for any sign of movement or flicker of life, I was answered only with stillness and quiet. My lungs slowly filled, trying to stop the tears from escaping the corners of my eyes, as I breathed through the awkwardness of being exposed in every possible way. The ultrasound technician looked down on me with both gentleness and the steely resolve of someone who has had to deliver bad news far too often. “I’m sorry, there doesn’t seem to be a heartbeat.” And just like that, I had lost my second child in a matter of months. 

The nature of a soap opera can be a grueling one. With a continuous narrative, the cast and crew work year-round producing over two hundred episodes annually. In a single day, a show may film up to four episodes while ideally getting it all in only one take. Meanwhile, it is being broadcasted to millions of homes worldwide. They say if you can handle this format, you can handle anything. And I believe it because I had just come off of an eight month-long baby loss storyline that felt like I had run a marathon. 

At the time, I had never experienced a pregnancy before. I was grateful for the artistic challenge and threw myself into the story with everything I had, researching placental abruption, stillbirth, and pregnancy loss. I knew people in my own life that had gone through the trauma of losing a child and I wanted to do them justice. It had to be honest. It had to be real. But what it entailed was months and months of grief on-camera that slowly started to seep into my life off-camera. While I walked away from that storyline with my first Daytime Emmy nomination, it left a psychological mark that was difficult for me to recover from…if only I knew what cruel irony lay ahead. 

As a woman, I never imagined having a child to be a difficult feat. From a young age we are told how easy it is to get pregnant, even with a condom, while on birth control, and pulling out—don’t forget about the pre-cum! I took the responsibility of it seriously and had been so careful for so many years of my life. I never thought that when I actually wanted it to happen, it wouldn’t. 

When my fiancé and I found out I was pregnant, we were simultaneously overjoyed and terrified. These would be our first steps together on the journey of parenthood. Immediately my shopping carts became full of baby books and my browser tabs full of information from bassinets to doulas to red light baby dream machines. The following weeks became a flurry of doctor’s appointments, blood work, and ultrasounds, all squeezed around my busy filming schedule. It was only until the progesterone results that everything began to unravel. 

I lost her at ten weeks. 

My dream of welcoming our baby into the world was slowly becoming more of a lucid nightmare. The doctor recommended an in-office D&C (dilation and curettage) so I wouldn’t have to experience the worst of it on set. “You’ll be drugged so you won’t feel much, if anything, slight cramping.” Unfortunately, like most things when it comes to women’s health, that was not true. As drugged as I may have been, something went awry. I felt it all. And I remembered everything. The image of myself desperately trying crawl away from the pain as the nurses tried to coax me back down to the edge of the table, my nonsensical pleadings, and the ever-echoing noise of that damned exam table paper. 

After I took time to heal emotionally and physically, I was determined to try again. I was told the chances of us experiencing another pregnancy loss were slim to none, but sadly our second attempt unraveled into sorrow and heartache as well. We lost him at 8 weeks. And all the while, I was filming. 

But early in our marriage, my husband and I started leading parallel lives. We were both effective in managing our work (he was busier professionally and traveled much of the year) and home lives. Once we stopped jumping the initial hurdles that a couple does—baby, surrogacy, two house renovations—I realized something was missing for both of us. When there wasn’t a project to invest in together, we didn’t have much to say to each other.

Once I slowed down and got quiet, I could hear myself saying, “We are not on the same page. I can either remain in this comfortable zone and distract myself, or I can face what is not working in my life and fix it.” I chose the latter. During this time I would wake up at 4:30 a.m., run on my treadmill, and listen to Glennon Doyle’s Untamed. It was the only time I could take a deep breath. I knew then that something had to shift.

Most of why my marriage didn’t work was not my ex-husband’s fault. He loves work. He loves being on set, on location. I knew this from ages 27 to 32, but it became a problem for me once the kids were older. I wanted a partner.

So, toward the beginning of the pandemic, Andrew and I decided to separate. The combination of being apart for most of the year for many years and growing apart emotionally took its toll.

Mason and I had met once, while we were both still married, four years ago. At a lunch with mutual friends, he sat next to my then husband, and they talked about Hollywood. I’m always shy in new social situations, so I excused myself and wandered around Park City. But I took note of Mason; he was cute, charming. Shortly after that lunch I started following him on Instagram. I enjoyed his sweet, self-deprecating humor. His intelligence made him all the more attractive. He started following me as well. My heart would leap as soon as he liked a post or commented on something I’d written. We had similar backgrounds: We’d grown up abroad, ping-ponging from England to Brazil (me) and Indonesia (him). 

Four days after I separated from Andrew, I was on a plane to San Francisco to visit this man I had only met once but who had stayed on my mind. I knew he’d been separated for two years. I wanted to see him, to confirm whether the image I’d built up in my mind matched reality. What I got was far more than I expected.

When I landed, Mason was at the bottom of the escalator holding a sign with my name on it. My heart was fluttering like a hummingbird. I felt at once super panicked but also strangely grounded. I couldn’t help but move toward him. He took me into his arms and we embraced. For five minutes. In our masks. Everyone at the arrival terminal walked around us. During a time when the world avoided all contact, when it was mandated that everyone stay six feet apart, Mason and I blended into each other. I thought to myself, Please kiss me. And he did.

From that day on Mason and I saw each other every other week. We began thinking about how to blend our families. Therapists and friends urged us to slow down, to enjoy the time alone, but we knew this was right. I guess what didn’t work for me last time was working for me now.

Friends asked me about my kids and the toll it would take on them. They saw my decision as sudden, impulsive. The problem was that they didn’t know it was 13 years in the making. What seemed like a huge event was in fact a slow unraveling. They just didn’t look close enough. That, or I’m a good actress.

But…were we? Honestly, even though I was an unemployed disaster at the time (damn you, financial crash of 2008), I wasn’t buying it. I was surrounded by phenomenal women of all ages— smart, independent, loving, laughing, and mostly having a blast. Sure, we ran up against our fair share of career challenges and dating woes, all great fodder for lively brunch conversation. But to us, the challenges of early adulthood did not seem like an omen of lifelong singledom and misery. I couldn’t help but wonder: Where on television were my Black sisters I knew, who were striving, thriving, and fighting to be their best selves, despite all the demands this world places on our minds, bodies, and souls? I wanted to see that show, and it wasn’t there. So I decided to create it.

A decade has passed since I wrote my very first draft, and much has changed. The hysteria of the doomed single Black woman has faded, and instead we proudly acknowledge that #BlackGirlsRock and celebrate #BlackGirlMagic and scream out in protest that #BlackLivesMatter. We are also very tired. We are so very tired of waking up to cell phone videos of dead Black bodies in the streets. We clamor for justice and hunger for escapism—for joy.

Run the World was written with the intention to bring joy through the journey of four loving, devoted sister-friends. It is specific and small, authentic and truthful, and deeply joyous.

For many of us, the heaviness of this social-political moment is inescapable. Black joy is not a rebuttal to Black trauma, nor is it a cure. Black joy is the thing we have, the thing we keep for ourselves—a sacred way in which we are able to laugh, to breathe, to smile through the darkest of moments, to survive and thrive, even when the persistence of racism seems to be unyielding. I want us to have this show right now. I want us to gather and laugh and cheer for these girls and have a 30-minute respite in our week from the madness. We need this show, because the horrific series we’re watching on our phones has been given far too many seasons, and desperately needs to be canceled.

I believe that protecting your peace, shielding your spirit, and nurturing your joy is protest. I believe watching smart, ambitious Black women striving to live their best lives is impactful. I believe making Harlem the entryway for experiencing modern New York City can be informative and aspirational, and I think watching healthy Black love can be transformational. 

In this moment, Black images are always made political, and while I don’t know if any of us can explain what it means to be political in 2021, I will conclude with this: Right now there are billboards in Los Angeles and Big Red buses in New York City with posters that read, Run the World. Next to those words is an image of four stunning young Black women. If that’s political, I’m here for it.

But in Promising Young Woman, Cassie (Carey Mulligan) doesn’t want to just get back at the men who assaulted her best friend or facilitated the assault—she also goes after the women who accepted their behavior as “boys just being boys.” 

I grew up in a world where, in movies, it was normal to see men getting girls drunk to sleep with them or girls waking up not knowing what has happened the night before and going on a “walk of shame.” It was just part of the culture. It was always troubling to me, but now that I’m older I’ve become much more aware of how it was totally normalized on screen. Boys were completely protected, and the girls were just expected to shut up or laugh it off.

I’ve always been interested in why good people do bad things and what happens when people who think they’re good realize they’re bad. It’s kind of what Cassie is out to prove. Her journey is much more troubling, in many ways, from the traditional violent revenge genre. She’s confronting the people in her life with the worst thing, which is waking up thinking they’re good and they’re not. They’re actually really bad—and she’s going to show them why. That’s horrifying. 

There are very few women who don’t have at least a passing familiarity with the kind of predatory behavior we see in the movie; all women sadly are acquainted with it to some degree. I felt very strongly with this film that if women are complicit in this sort of thing—like Alison Brie’s character, Madison—then it is very much by force. In order to protect themselves, women have often had to “be one of the guys.” In other words, diminish other people’s pain because they had to diminish theirs. I think Madison’s callousness is probably the result of a lot of learned behavior and survival tactics on her part.

I wrote Promising Young Woman before #MeToo. There’s still a long way to go, but it was such a relief to so many of us that the movement finally started shining a light on what was really going on. Anyone who’s lived in a woman’s body for more than five minutes knows you experience the world in a different way. My friends and I have been talking about that for a long, long time.

Which is why I want Promising Young Woman to ask more questions than it answers. I would never want to tell people what to think or how to experience the film, because this stuff is so personal. I just wanted to make something that felt true to me. 

Emerald Fennell is a Golden Globe and Emmy nominated writer, director, actress and author. In addition to Promising Young Woman, she can currently be seen as Camilla Parker Bowles in the fourth season of The Crown.

When I was in third grade, I asked my friend Maddie if I was the girliest girl she knew. “Well, sure,” she said. “But sometimes you’re…cool.” I was furious. I loved Hello Kitty and wore pink skirts and said “sorry” a lot. I was a girly girl. 

But over time, cool girl became my new mold. By middle school I was the girl who preferred tree-climbing to ballet, classic rock to boy bands, chilling with the guys to gossiping with the girls…and would tell you about it any chance she got. The role fit me like a glove, so long as I shaved off certain parts of myself. I really did love tree-climbing—but secretly, I was also dying to hear five cute British guys tell me “What Makes You Beautiful.”

“Fat,” “loud,” “opinionated”—by this point in my life I’d heard a thousand ways a girl could be too large. So I only gave myself enough room to be one thing at a time. The brain or the beauty. The tough chick or the sweetheart. The cool girl or the girly girl. Congratulating myself for rejecting the rules of traditional femininity, I didn’t notice I’d still reduced myself to a type.

An unexpected complication to this came in high school, when I became disabled. Using a wheelchair, I took up more physical space than I’d ever counted on. I couldn’t diminish that square of four wheels by leaning on one foot or angling a knee inward. At the same time, I found myself fighting for space of a more metaphoric kind: the space to be a full person.

In a backwards way, I used disability stereotypes as my roadmap. People so often spoke to me in baby voice that I stopped acting goofy in public. I used big words so people would see my intelligence, though if I went too far, I’d be pitied as the “tragic disabled genius.” I learned not to show if I was angry or sad or tired; someone was bound to assume I was upset about being in a wheelchair. But I couldn’t be too happy or I’d get called “inspiring.”

With my personhood in question, my womanhood was hardly considered. Unless I showed it off of course, which I did—form-fitting tops, short skirts, lipstick, though all in moderation because a “disabled slut” would be deemed “sad.” I’m not proud to say that I thought about getting a boyfriend just to show the world I could. What a pastiche of prove-’em-wrongs I was.

I was so used to being reduced to the chair that, in order to prove I was more than that, I reduced myself even further. I buried my humanity in order to make people believe I was human. It was an extreme version of what I’d been doing my entire life.