Andrea

“I wrote mostly about men. I hadn't interviewed a lot of women. Whenever I did, the stories were always about the struggle to be the kind of woman who got interviewed—the writers who were counted out, the politicians who were mistaken for secretaries, the actresses who were told they were too fat and tall and short and skinny and ugly and pretty. It was all the same story, which is not to say it wasn't important. But it was boring. The first time I interviewed a man, I understood we were talking about something more like the soul.

The men hadn't had any external troubles. They didn't have a fear that they didn't belong. They hadn't had any obstacles. They were born knowing they belonged, and they were reassured at every turn just in case they'd forgotten. But they were still creative and still people, and so they reached for problems out of an artistic sense of yearning. Their problems weren't real. They had no identity struggle, no illness, no money fears. Instead, they had found the true stuff of their souls—of all our souls—the wound lying beneath all the survivalism and circumstance.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is in Trouble

“Those men’s varying degrees of politeness shielded the world from their real feelings, but politeness is ultimately unsustainable. And so that doctor abused her. And those men raped those women. And Sam here couldn’t bear for her to do anything except bend over and take it.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is in Trouble

“I didn’t like the dark matter part. I feel like you can’t just decide something must exist because everything’s reacting to it. You can’t just give it a name and hope it’s true.”

“But maybe the objects are just behaving in a way we don’t understand. Maybe nothing is making them act that way but themselves.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is in Trouble

“He would never be comforted by the adage "God doesn't give us more than we can handle" after that. Because what is the metric of handling something? Not killing yourself?”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is in Trouble