Amy Koppelman penned A Mouthful of Air, a powerful novel years ahead of its time—and now, 20 years on, she discusses the film version of it she directed that hits theaters this month.
Transcript
Debbie Millman:
Amy Koppelman has published three novels. Two have been made into movies. I Smile Back, her second novel, was made into a devastating film starring Sarah Silverman. Coming out this fall is her second film, based on her first novel. Both the book and the movie are titled A Mouthful of Air, and Amy Koppelman both wrote and directed this movie. If there’s one thing all of her work has in common, books and films, it’s their emotional intensity and a willingness to take on difficult subjects like trauma, depression and aloneness. Also, she really knows how to tell a really good story. Amy Koppelman, welcome to Design Matters.
Amy Koppelman:
Thank you.
Debbie Millman:
Amy, is it true that after graduate school, you found out where Joan Didion lived in Manhattan and, uninvited, dropped of a book manuscript on her doorstep?
Amy Koppelman:
Yes. I read that there was some problem Cindy Crawford was having in her building, and Joan Didion was on Page Six, and Joan Didion was the president of the board or on the board, and somehow they mentioned the building. So I knew. I mean, I don’t know how much time had passed between when I saw that and when I dropped it off, but I had been getting so many rejections from agents. It’s this weird thing because on one hand, I’m this terribly shy and insecure person, yet no matter how many rejections I got, I just kept sending out envelopes. I still don’t understand that, because there must be some part of me that deep down is like, “You’re the bomb. What you have to say matters,” even though at a table or all the time, I’m sure nothing I have to say matters all the time.
But anyway, there was this moment where I was like, “there is a fine line between delusion of grandeur and actually maybe you’re just not good, and maybe you could ask her: Should you keep doing this?” And so I dropped off what was my thesis, which was mostly this manuscript, but it was called Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight then. I just was like, “Am I a real writer? Can you tell me? Because if I’m not and I shouldn’t be doing this, I want to know.” Because I never started writing thinking about writing books. I really just started writing as, I guess, a place to get better, and then somehow that mutated into telling stories, so I didn’t know. Then she wrote me back and she said, “You are a real writer.”
Debbie Millman:
You asked her. You wrote and asked if you’re a real writer or not a real writer, and she told you you were.
Amy Koppelman:
Yeah. She said, “Yes, Amy. You are a real writer.”
Debbie Millman:
Amy, you recently stated that if you had a happy childhood, home represents safety. A tumultuous childhood, and home becomes associated with danger. Can you talk a little bit about how you grew up and what home came to represent for you at that time?
Amy Koppelman:
Well, I don’t think until I had a home when I got older with my husband that I realized how scared I was in my own home. I loved my parents more than anything. I never thought of home as being a dangerous place, but when I look back now, I can see ways in which I was very vulnerable. I had been a very bulimic person, and when I moved in with my husband, he left for work one day and I went to do that in a garbage bag. It was the first time I was there, and I said, “I can’t do this to him. He loves me and I love him and I can’t do this to him.” I didn’t do it, and I never threw up again. The problem with that was, there was … and I was an extraordinarily high-functioning bulimic, then as soon as I stopped doing that, I fell into a very, very bad massive depression. I understand now, well, that’s because you didn’t have a place to put those feelings.
But from that moment living with him and in our first apartment, which very similar to Julie in the book, I wanted to make it like a dollhouse and I wanted there to be so much color, and I had strawberry wallpaper. And the reason that I wanted to meet you so badly was because I thought that you more than basically anybody in the world would understand and maybe even be able to explain to me why both Julie and my own insistence on color was so important. I mean, I think now, looking back, it’s like, well, if you have a lot of color and your eyes don’t have any space to land on the walls in your house, then you don’t have to go inward because you can keep looking at all the color.
But that’s kind of the negative way to look at it, because I also think that there was an insistence on this idea of a happy home, and a happy home looks like a dollhouse in my mind. And in a dollhouse, there’s wallpaper on the ceiling and there’s wallpaper on the walls. A dollhouse is the way we envision home when we’re little, right?
Debbie Millman:
Right, yeah. One thing I think is super interesting about your question about color is that I always refer to those first sort of two decades of my life as the black years. I think that color is representative of energy, and color is a stimulant, and color really entertains the eyes in a lot of ways, so I don’t think it’s an accident that you chose to bring color to counter what you might have been feeling inside, the darkness. We talk about depression as a darkness, and it makes a lot of sense to me, as somebody that’s spent a lot of time analyzing color.
You started writing at a very young age. I understand that you won a writing contest held by the Daughters of the American Revolution.
Amy Koppelman:
Oh my God. No, I didn’t win it, but I don’t even know how you knew that I did that. But yes, I did. I had wanted to be a writer when I was a little girl and I entered a Daughters of the American Revolution contest and I didn’t have any idea that Amy Lynn Levine from New Jersey was definitely not going to win the Daughters of the American Revolution writing contest.
Debbie Millman:
But you got a certificate.
Amy Koppelman:
But I got a certificate, and that’s all that matters.
Debbie Millman:
OK, that’s winning. That’s winning.
Amy Koppelman:
Yeah. I kept that on my wall for years and years.
Debbie Millman:
One of the things that really struck me about reading that about you was that you walked back to your seat smiling and feeling proud.
Amy Koppelman:
So proud.
Debbie Millman:
Was that the first moment you had of feeling proud of yourself?
Amy Koppelman:
Probably, because it’s very hard for me to feel proud of myself. But I feel proud of my family. And yesterday for like a split second when they released the trailer for a movie, my daughter was like, “Wow, Mom,” and my son was like, “Wow,” and I was like, “OK, I’m going to let myself feel proud for like two seconds and not worry that if I feel proud, God’s going to punish me.”
Debbie Millman:
I hear you. I remember the first time I felt proud. I was in camp. It was between second and third grade. It was the year before or the half-year before the black years really kicked in and I remember walking to the lake and thinking, “I’m going into third grade. I am so proud of myself.” And I remember that feeling like it was palpable, like I could feel the feeling in my hands right now of what that carried in me.
Amy Koppelman:
Third grade is … things got murky for me around third grade.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, you wrote that it was around this time that you began suffering from depression and stated that it was, “As if a gauze came down” around you “like sluggish sadness.” Do you have a sense of why it began at that particular time?
Amy Koppelman:
Yes, in retrospect I do.
Debbie Millman:
How did you cope? How did you cope with your depression at that time? Did your parents realize something was wrong and try to get you help?
Amy Koppelman:
I didn’t ever realize that that was … it was only when I finally began taking antidepressant medication when my son was around a year and a half, and everything did go … it was all those cliches, from black and white to technicolor. And then I started realizing, oh, things used to look like this. I remember in second grade, things looking like this. Just now even in my left eye, I could see the color green on trees, looking out of Ms. Page’s window. And then something just changed and I didn’t know that it changed until I could see again. If you need the medication, it just basically gives you a trampoline so when you’re in freefall, you know that you’re not going to crash. What that does is it gives you the ability to feel. It gives you the ability to hear a song and cry, and it gives you the ability to see something beautiful and not be completely crushed by it.
People will be like, “Well, you won’t get anything creative done if you take an antidepressant and you’ll lose your libido.” And I was just like, “I don’t know anybody …” When I was at my most depressed, I wasn’t getting anything done. And the last thing I was really into, it was like, “Hey, let’s—”
Debbie Millman:
Kink around.
Amy Koppelman:
I don’t know how to say that. But the way I was able to understand what happened was only when I got color back again. Then when I went off of medication when I was pregnant with my daughter and everything went that dark that quickly, knowing the difference, that next to each other, that was very hard, because I knew that this wasn’t right. It wasn’t supposed to feel like this, because I didn’t have to go from third grade to then. I had to go from like three weeks before til that moment.
In the book and in the movie, the moment where I really break with that character is that when I gave birth to my daughter, after nine months of praying to the Zoloft container, when I was going … I took it to the fucking hospital with my shit. Then I held her in my arms and she was such a good little breastfeeder and I just thought, “No, I’ve done this for so long. I did this for these nine months and I did this for these however countless years. Why should she have to pay a price for my weakness?” Because it’s still a weakness, strength thing. And so for like five days or seven days, I didn’t take the medication. I mean, I didn’t exactly lie about it because no one would have thought that I didn’t take the medication because all I wanted to do was take the medication, and I would just secretly breastfeed her. Because I felt like, “OK, well, if I can give her six weeks”—I think that’s what it was—“six weeks, just make it through six more weeks, she’ll have all the nutrients that she needs.”
But then around five days in, I realized, “Oh, I’m about to hit a wall.” That’s when I then called Brian and I said, “When you come home, I have to take this medicine and you have to check under my tongue.” Because I was like, there is this moment where I was not sure if I could trust myself to actually really swallow it, because so strong was this idea of being weak versus being strong and being a good mom versus being a bad mom. I was sure that if I didn’t breastfeed her, I was a bad mom. And it took me a really long time not to feel guilty about that.
Debbie Millman:
It’s so interesting hearing these real-life experiences that you’ve had, having read so much of your work, and now sort of realizing that I Smile Back and A Mouthful of Air are almost as if you had made different decisions and what the consequences of those decisions would be. I definitely want to talk to you about that.
Amy Koppelman:
Yeah. I realized when I finished Hesitation Wounds, which is my most hopeful book … my son was graduating high school. It was right around that week. Your subconscious is so fucking strong. And the protagonist in that book, she treats treatment-resistant depression, and her brother had killed himself and she realizes in the course of the book that she had never really allowed herself to fully engage because of this. She was protecting herself. And at the end, the whole entire book balances on this moment of her daughter, which she adopted, saying to her to stick out her tongue to taste the snow. Her daughter’s a little girl from Cambodia and has never seen snow before, and the moment of the mother saying, “Should I stick out my …” the hesitation in that, in, do you stick out your tongue and engage in life and feel the snow against your tongue and the joy of that? It took me like seven years or eight years until I realized you can’t balance an entire book on a split second like that.
But it also took me that time to realize, “Oh, you’re writing a book about finally allowing yourself permission to be OK and to be happy. And so that’s when I realized, looking back, “Oh, A Mouthful of Air, you were writing through the fear of if you didn’t get the help you needed.” But I had no idea. I thought I was just writing about this character. And in I Smile Back, I was writing through the fear, I guess, of like, “I worked so hard to build this little family that I love, but inside of me I’m a very bad person and I’m like my father and I destroy the people that I love.” And that has nothing to do with even anything sexual. Just some people just destroy the people that they love, almost as a preemptive strike, like, “If I can hurt you before you hurt me …”
Then I wrote Hesitation Wounds, and now my son is 25, almost 26, and my daughter is 21, and I was with them yesterday and I thought, “Look at that. You didn’t ruin them.” I’m always surprised still that somehow they’re so beautiful.
Debbie Millman:
Well, I think that has a lot to do with you, actually. The opposite is they’re the product of good parenting.
Amy Koppelman:
Yeah. And it was very important to me to have a steady home for them. I always wanted to have a kitchen table where they could do their homework. It sounds so silly, but where they could come home and have a snack and do their homework, and I was always so grateful that they could have that, that they weren’t distracted by chaos and craziness.
Debbie Millman:
I want to go back in time a little bit to right before you began writing professionally. I’ve been researching various childhood responses to trauma in an effort to understand how there seems to be really almost polar opposite directions people tend to go when they’re depressed, traumatized, abused. Some people work to overachieve in an effort to prove to themselves that they’re not as worthless as they feel, and other people just give up because they know they have no hope. They feel no hope. You’re really the former rather than the latter, despite your troubles at the time. You were accepted to an Ivy League college. You got your undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania, very, very competitive school. What did you major in at the time? What did you think you wanted to do professionally at that point?
Amy Koppelman:
I actually wanted to be a sociology major, but my mother said, “You should be a political science major because it’d be better for your prospects in getting married.” She really didn’t know better and really believed that the most important thing was for me to get married. And luckily, I got married young and, luckily, I married the right person, but it was really good fortune or some survival mechanism in me that just knew that Brian was the right person.
Debbie Millman:
How did you meet Brian? I’ve done a lot of research. I can’t find the origin story.
Amy Koppelman:
Oh, I met Brian through his sister, who I had met … the girl who grew up across the street from me, Melissa Jacobson, said, “You’re going on a teen tour,” which my mother sent me on because you would send your kids on this music or teen tour to meet their husbands. I mean, I’m 15. But anyway, so I go on this teen tour—
Debbie Millman:
Very Jewish.
Amy Koppelman:
Yeah, and I meet Brian’s sister and she invites me over and I remember meeting him for the first time at the kitchen table. Then that night, we went to sleep. He went out. He was 19. I guess I was 15 or something. I remember I couldn’t fall asleep, but I remember thinking he was cute and she said, “Oh, well, if you can’t fall asleep, you could go into my brother’s room. He has lots of books.” So I went into his room and I started reading The Fountainhead and I fell asleep on his bed. Then that night, he came into the room when he came home from wherever he was and he was like, “My first girlfriend …”—this sounds so ridiculous—“Was named Amy. My best friend,” who’s still his partner, “Is named Levine.” My name was Amy Levine. And he told me that night, “One day, I’m going to marry you.” We had been talking and I was just like, “OK. Not if you knew me.” That was my exact response.
And then we were very, very close friends, but I liked a guy … I mean, I was crazy about a guy who was mean, and I liked him more. Then there’d be moments where Brian and I were almost together and then we weren’t, and I had this terrible fear of if he really knew me and knew what I was inside underneath the skin. I mean, imagine what that would be if then he actually did kiss me and was like, “Whoa, this is a terrible poisonous snake in here.”
Debbie Millman:
You still suffer from that a little bit.
Amy Koppelman:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
And you’ve been married for over almost 30 years, right?
Amy Koppelman:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Well, for those that are listening that might be wondering who we’re talking about, Amy’s husband is Brian Koppelman, who created with David Levine the massive TV show Billions. Brian’s actually been on Design Matters, so you can go and listen to that as well. I believe in that episode, he does talk about how much he loves his wife, Amy Koppelman.
Amy Koppelman:
Oh, I don’t listen to his podcasts because I get enough of him in the kitchen.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Again, going back in time a little bit, just because I find your history so incredibly compelling, you talked a little bit about this earlier on, suffering from bulimia. All through high school and college you suffered, and you’ve written how good at it you were. No one knew you weren’t satisfied until you threw up blood. I actually heard you say that on Brian’s podcast when he interviewed you, and I read that more recently in an interview that you conducted. But when I first heard it, it just broke my heart. My mother suffered from bulimia and I used to hear her throwing up, and it’s just a heart-wrenching experience to witness. Do you know what first triggered your bulimia?
Amy Koppelman:
Yeah. I was in the mall with my mom and … there was some after-school special that showed what that was. Then I was in the mall with my mom and this girl who lived down the street from me … I had gained 10 or 15 pounds or something, and she goes, “Oh, Amy, I didn’t even recognize you.” And my mom was like, “It doesn’t matter …” I feel bad because I love my mom, but this is what she said: “It doesn’t matter how smart you are.” She just believed you had to be pretty and thin. And I remember going into some fucking restaurant and just throwing up and that moment, going down the escalator at the mall, and I knew how to do it because of this after-school special that I had seen.
And then it just starts to take over your life. But the biggest fear that I had was that anybody would know, because it was the way that I was able to not disappoint anybody and to be a perfect daughter and everything else. All was reliant on being able to have this release.
Debbie Millman:
It’s not surprising that when you decided to stop … cold turkey, by the way, and I don’t know anybody that’s ever been able to do that … that you went into a major depression. I mean, of course. That was what was keeping you from not feeling the feelings.
Amy Koppelman:
Yeah. And it first manifested that I was very scared to go out. Brian would leave for work. Somehow I got away with not working and he would leave and I would get into bed and be in bed all day. Then he’d come home and I would smile, and it was when Kurt Cobain killed himself and I remember thinking, “I’m doing way too many things the same as him. I’m in bed. I have really bad stomach pain and I’m just lying here praying that somehow I could die.” That’s all I wanted to do was die, but I knew that he loved me and if I did that, if I killed myself in all the myriad fantastic ways that it could be done, I would destroy him, and I couldn’t do that. I would rather be alive in this, unable to function than to hurt him like that.
When I saw that with Kurt Cobain, that’s when I realized, “Oh, I don’t want to die,” and then I started getting help. “I don’t want to be like Kurt Cobain.” There was nothing and is nothing romantic about suicide. I’m somebody who just always wants to be happy, and I’m a very grateful person. If I’m going to say anything good about myself, I would say I’m a very appreciative person. So it does take that much to make me happy, which is also why being sad, it doesn’t make sense. And that’s how you know, this is not something that you are necessarily in control of, depression. Just like nobody wants to not be able to breathe, and so you get an inhaler.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I love how you talk about having an illness that happens to be mental versus physical, and that if we have diabetes, we take diabetes medication. If we have heart disease, we take statins. We do all sorts of things to prolong our lives and to ensure that our bodies don’t overtake us. Why wouldn’t we do the same with our minds?
Amy Koppelman:
Because even now, in the same conversation, I could say to you that it’s real and I could say to you that I’m a liar and that maybe it’s not real and maybe it is that I’m weak. I mean, the nature of depression, it only reinforces the feelings of the symptoms of, like, “You’re a bad person. There’s no reason to try,” whatever your inner dialogue is of why the world is better off without you in it. Julie Davis in the movie, especially, I really wanted to write about a mother who really believes that the greatest thing she could do for her family is to not be there, because if she’s out of the way, then she won’t hurt them, then she can’t hurt them. Because as if your mother kills herself, you’re not going to be fucked up from that. But in my—
Debbie Millman:
Right, but they don’t think that. I had an experience in my life recently where somebody that I cared about very, very, very much took his own life. In an effort to try and understand it, I’ve done a lot of reading, a lot of research and I think what it comes down to is the pain is so great for the person that they truly have convinced themselves that the world and that everybody that they love would be better off without them, would be happier without them, and they just have lost complete touch with the idea that they could be loved.
Amy Koppelman:
Right. Or they might even know that they’re loved, but then it’s that they’re not worthy of that. And so the person that they think they’re loving is actually not the person that they’re loving, because the person that they are is a terrible person. And actually, COVID came and so we didn’t really have many screenings, but there were a couple times where people were like, “Oh, you’re glamorizing suicide.”
Debbie Millman:
What?
Amy Koppelman:
And I was like, “What?” And they’re like, “Because she looks so happy at the end. She looks so happy.” And I was like, I think that that’s something people don’t understand. I do think for some people, and for Julie specifically, there’s a moment of true relief. She’s doing a good thing and she believes that. So then they said, “But, I mean, that doesn’t make any sense.” And I’m like, “Well, of course it fucking doesn’t make any sense. She’s not well.” Of course it doesn’t make any sense. The logic isn’t … I work a lot with people who try to help people who have depression and suicide and the one thing they haven’t gotten better at … they can predict a lot of things. They still can’t figure out who kills themselves and why. There’s still no real way to figure out who actually does it and who doesn’t. They haven’t been able to figure out, what is the thing that makes a person actually do it?
Sometimes it’s just as simple as somebody knocked on the door at the right time. The problem with that is that that’s what then makes it so painful for the family that they leave behind, because they go, “What if? What if? What if?” And I really wanted to, in the movie, show that the collateral damage of suicide is so profound for every generation. And also, the husband … lots of people, like, “Oh, the husband didn’t do enough.” If you love somebody who’s that depressed, if you love somebody who had tried to kill themselves … I mean, I never even actually tried to kill myself, but if you have, you’re in jail. You can’t act toward that person like you would a normal person because you’re scared that, like, “Wait, am I going to be the person who said the thing that is the thing that …” And so it works both ways. “If I had called, I could have saved them. If I had just been a tiny bit nicer or a tiny bit softer, they wouldn’t have done it.”
And to you, there’s no way if you’re a loving person and you love your family member or your friend that killed themselves that you can actually really fully ever return to the person you were before, because you can’t forgive yourself even if you know intellectually it wasn’t your fault and there was nothing you could do. So my hope for the movie is that it will help get women to talk more about how scary it is to be a mom, all women, how scary … you have no idea. All of a sudden, you’re responsible for this little life that can’t protect itself. Two, getting people to talk about suicide and the collateral damage it does. I’m very angry at people who kill themselves, especially now, for some reason.
Debbie Millman:
The thing about A Mouthful of Air … when the book first came out, it was compared to some really seminal feminist works, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. And just for my listeners that might not be as familiar with the book as they will be now that they hear this podcast, is the story of Julie Davis, who you’ve mentioned. She’s a young wife and mother battling an inner war between the love she feels for her family and the voice in her head that insists that they’d be better off if she were not alive. We first meet Julie several weeks after a suicide attempt and she’s trying to remake her life with her husband and her 1-year-old son, whose birthday happens to be the day that we meet her. And while A Mouthful of Air is about a mother suffering from acute postpartum depression, what I found really interesting, Amy, is that aside from the afterword, the term “postpartum depression” only appears once in the book. I did a search.
Amy Koppelman:
Does it appear even in the book at all?
Debbie Millman:
Just once.
Amy Koppelman:
Oh wow.
Debbie Millman:
Just once, as the doctor is talking about some of what she might be suffering from. You wrote about how in 1997, you went to a postpartum depression conference and there were 20 people there. So despite the fact that we know now that one out of every five new mothers suffers from postpartum depression, it seemed that very few people were talking about this topic back then, and a lot of people got angry about the ending of your book.
Amy Koppelman:
Yeah, well, I don’t think anybody sets out to write this book. I certainly didn’t set out to write this book. If you knew that this was what you were writing, you would never write it. I remember being in a room with my kids writing that last scene and I was happy with them. They were playing and I remember my fingers jumped off the keyboard because it was just terrible. Because in the book, different than the movie, there’s infanticide, and I remember thinking, “I don’t even know if that’s humanly capable. Can a mother kill her child?”
Debbie Millman:
And now we know, sure, that they can.
Amy Koppelman:
But I remember going to Ask Jeeves because it was before Google and one very rudimentary picture came up, and it was the first time I saw the words “postpartum depression.” It was like this butterfly that was waving and this woman wrote a thing to her daughter who had killed herself. And I remember when going to different agents with the book … and that’s when I saw the word “postpartum depression.” I was like, “Oh.” And I remember when trying to get an agent, this one agent said to me, “This is the reason I got into publishing. This is what I wanted to do,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, “but I’m sorry, I can’t. It’s too dark. No one’s going to read this. It doesn’t sell.” And I kept saying, “But it’s a real thing. But it’s a real thing.” And she kept saying, “It doesn’t matter. It’s not going to sell.”
I remember when Andrea Yates, who was really the first person that we talked about, killed her children and was on the cover of Time, I thought, “Oh, now people are going to finally understand this is a real thing.” I remember calling that same woman and saying, “Now do you see? It’s a real thing, see? It’s on the cover of Time. This is a real thing.” And she goes, “Oh, now you will never get this book published. This is so horrible.” And that’s when we really started talking about postpartum depression and people didn’t understand, like, “Well, afterwards, how come Andrea Yates said … how come she was able to, when she was interviewed, understand what she did? She must have known what she was doing.” And they didn’t understand what it was to have a psychotic break.
I mean, I remember when the book came out, at some point this woman who said she was something with Julia Roberts called and said, “We’d really like to do this.” And I remember leaning against a brick wall on West End Avenue and I was like, “Julia Roberts?” This was, “Julia would love to do this, and it’s amazing because at the end when she calls 9-1-1 …” And I was like, “What?” The woman read the ending of the book, but it was so painful to her that she just read it differently, and I was like …
Debbie Millman:
I was going to say, “Wait, did I miss that?”
Amy Koppelman:
… “But she doesn’t call 9-1-1.” And she’s like, “What do you mean?” And she goes, “I mean, can she?” And I was like, “Yes, if she wasn’t having a psychotic break.” Now, most people with postpartum depression don’t have psychotic breaks. Most people with postpartum depression don’t kill their children. But it’s a cautionary tale, because the mind is very strong. It protects you, but it also hurts you.
Debbie Millman:
Nearly 20 years after A Mouthful of Air was published, it has been adapted into a film, which you also wrote and directed, and it will be released in October. Congratulations, Amy.
Amy Koppelman:
Thank you.
Debbie Millman:
You must be so excited.
Amy Koppelman:
Yeah. I’m nervous, but I’m excited. It’s a pretty film.
Debbie Millman:
It’s a beautiful movie. I’ve seen it and I loved it. It’s a painful movie, but it’s a necessary movie, and it is a necessary subject that people talk about. The movie stars Mank Oscar nominee Amanda Seyfried, American Horror Story’s Finn Witrock, Amy Irving, Billions’ Paul Giamatti, Dexter’s Jennifer Carpenter, and more. Did you have a hand in the casting? It’s such a star-studded lineup.
Amy Koppelman:
I mean, I still don’t have an agent and I was able to get to Amanda because her husband Tommy was in I Smile Back. She had the big change where she said, “You have to give her a career,” and so I made her a children’s book illustrator. I did it really quickly on the spot because I had had this Pinky Tinkerbink character that I had made for my daughter, and so I knew I had drawings of this character. I was like, “What about if I make her a children’s book illustrator?” And the character Pinky Tinkerbink—my daughter was profoundly bullied … another thing I feel very guilty about … and she had very bad crossed eyes, and she was very dyslexic, like me. She’s even more dyslexic than me, which is hard to imagine. I made this character who had this very bad, ugly-looking finger, and the idea was that this character’s ugly-looking finger that the kids teased her about was really a key, and she could solve all the answers and everything she needed to know with this key.
We would always talk about Pinky Tinkerbink, so I told Amanda about the character, and then we made this story about Pinky Tinkerbink. And so for Julie, she’s able to help … I mean, it sounds so cheesy when I say it like this, but she’s able to help everyone else unlock their fears. It opens with a book that she wrote called Unlock Your Happy, but she can’t unlock her own fears. I think that that’s true with so many people. We’re always much more capable of helping other people than helping ourselves. Somebody said to me the other day, “If you listened to your own advice, you would never let that person talk to you that way,” about me, and I was like, “That’s true.”
Debbie Millman:
We make exceptions for ourselves in the worst possible ways. So, Julie Davis, the character in the movie, is not just an illustrator. She’s also a writer, so she writes and illustrates her own children’s books. The books are beautiful. Do you have any plans to publish a Pinky book?
Amy Koppelman:
The Pinky book that you see in the movie, I have it and it’s like 58 pages, and I sent it to all these different publishers, and they all rejected it across the board. Even when I was like, “It’s coming out on a movie with …” Nothing. But I’ve never been good at that. The reason I was able to make I Smile Back was basically a miracle. I got the book to Sarah and she opened it. I had heard her on Howard Stern talking and I was like, “She’s going to understand this book.” And see, if you’re me and you come out on little presses, you know you’re not going to have a lot of readers and you just want to try to find the people that will understand. And I knew she would understand, and when I went and met with her, I was like, “If I adapted this, would you be in it?” I think she said yes, just figuring, “I don’t want to hurt her feelings.” Like, everyone says they’re going to adapt something, and—
Debbie Millman:
No, but she also said something else. We’re talking about Sarah Silverman. She said, “Yes, as long as it doesn’t suck.”
Amy Koppelman:
Yeah, “Yes, as long as it doesn’t suck.” And she said, “I mean, I just never actually thought you were going to show up with the fucking script for me to do.” And that movie was hard to make. We made that for like $400,000 because weirdly, people didn’t think she could act in that movie.
Debbie Millman:
She should have gotten an Academy Award nomination for that role.
Amy Koppelman:
Yeah. And I was like, “What?” It’s just like, “Look at her. What do you think she is?” She’s all tentacles. I think she’s all an open … she feels way too much, so of course … with Amanda, this was before Mank, and there was resistance to her being a rom com person, like she’s too pretty and fluffy and … I remember thinking, “Look at her eyes. What do you think’s going on in there in those eyes? How do you not see that?” And I was really lucky though, because John Sloss, who is the same person who was able to sell I Smile Back, he helped raise the money and so we were able to make this money with Maven Pictures and we got a $2.3 million budget.
Debbie Millman:
Nice.
Amy Koppelman:
Which was much more than $400,000. But it’s funny, I think no matter how big a budget they give you, you think, “Uh oh. Shit. I need more money,” but we figured it out.
Debbie Millman:
What was it like for you as a director?
Amy Koppelman:
We worked on this movie for a year. Amanda and I, we went through every scene together and we kept trying to get the money, we kept trying to get the money, and then we were down to like … she had to do something and we knew we had like three-and-a-half weeks left or something, and we got the money and we had three-and-a-half weeks of prep. All the planning … I had everything laid out, but three-and-a-half weeks of prep and I had no idea what I was doing. I mean, I can barely work my cell phone. I remember just going, “You’ll just do it. You’ll just figure it out, and even though you don’t understand, if you can see the feelings …” If you look at her … I didn’t ever really look behind the monitor. If you look at her and you can feel it when you’re looking at her, then the screen will capture it.
But then two nights before we were about to begin filming, when everything was a mess and nothing was ready, I do remember coming home and Brian answering the door and me going, “Oh my God. What did I get myself into? I have no idea what I’m doing.” And then I stay in a room alone all day long, and then there were all these people that were looking to me to have the answers, so it was a learning curve. But I thought, “OK, you have this chance, so take advantage of it.” Just know in my head, I heard myself say, “But you lived, so this is going to be nothing compared to that.”
Debbie Millman:
Exactly. You already got through the hard stuff. Amy, over the years, you’ve stated that writing has become a healthier receptacle for your sadness.
Amy Koppelman:
Yeah. It’s better than a garbage bag.
Debbie Millman:
And that it is also the purest part of who you are, because it’s the only time where you’re not worrying about whether or not other people are OK. I’m wondering if you have any tips to evolve to this state if you’re not a writer. How do you get to a place where you stop worrying, you stop people-pleasing, you stop sort of pretzeling yourself into what other people want and need from you?
Amy Koppelman:
Well, the idea of, well, if you’re a writer … I actually really think everybody is a writer. If you can go to the coffee shop with your friend and you tell your friend a story, you’ve written something. It’s just the connection of letting yourself do it with your hands versus your mouth, which is why voice memo is great. I, of course, the past two months have gotten almost nothing written, so it’s something I struggle with all the time, how to write. I still have that inner voice in my head all the time telling me it’s self-indulgent, it’s stupid, it’s shallow, “The story’s shallow. You’re shallow,” all the things that you hear.
But if I don’t do it, then I’m not as good of mother or friend or wife. So even if I have two months of getting nothing written, I have nothing to show for it, it’s just like you sit down … it’s like [inaudible] practice book and you just keep doing it, because eventually, you’ll have that moment of understanding. For me, I never know what I’m setting out to write. I just write and write and write, and then I get to a scene and I realize … I know the feeling. I knew in A Mouthful of Air, I was writing about shame. I knew that word, “shame,” and I knew that’s what I was writing about. Then I got to a scene and I was like, “Oh, that’s what this book’s about,” and then I went back and saw that the subconscious is so strong, it’s all there. My books are always very short, but I’ll have hundreds of thousands of words to end up with barely what’s defined as a novel.
Debbie Millman:
I read that Brian said that you won’t be satisfied until you have a page with just a dot on it.
Amy Koppelman:
Yes, no, I know, it’s true. My new book I’ve been working on for so long and it just keeps … I keep hearing it in these little stanzas or something and I’m like, “Why are you hearing it like this? It’s impossible to understand. Can’t you just write long sentences?”
Debbie Millman:
But I can’t imagine how somebody can get to sort of the perfect number of words in a sentence without writing thousands of words and then editing it down. I don’t think it just comes out that way. I think it takes enormous effort. You and I were talking about this before we started the show, the idea that you have to sort of fight to get to the simple and that you have to go through all of that muck to really come out with something elegant and …
Amy Koppelman:
I do think the difference between what makes somebody a writer writer … because I think everybody’s a writer … is the rewriting, is the you really are trying to get the words right. For me, I’m always just like, “Am I being honest here?” And even if it’s ugly and even if somebody who doesn’t understand might think badly of what I’ve written or confuse me and the character … After I Smile Back came out, I had this one meeting with this one producer and people had been asking me this again and again. He goes, “So, how did you do the research for this novel?” And finally I looked at him and I just go, “I just fucked a million guys.”
Debbie Millman:
That’s what they’re wondering.
Amy Koppelman:
It’s like, “Fuck you.” Yeah. But for me, it’s like the people who understand will understand, and I just have to keep doing what I’m doing. And even if nobody reads my books … even Hesitation Wounds was rejected by over 50-something places. I Smile Back was—
Debbie Millman:
80.
Amy Koppelman:
Yeah, 81 I think was—
Debbie Millman:
81?
Amy Koppelman:
Yeah. I guess I’ve been so saved by fiction that my respect for that form and for all that it’s given me, I think if I’m honest, then it’ll find the person out there, and that person will know maybe in some small way that they’re not bad, that they should continue to live. I guess that is the thing with all the books. I guess that’s what I’m always saying, is that yeah, just hold on for one more breath.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Amy, your books are so important. A Mouthful of Air was so ahead of its time. I’m sort of mad that you feel that because they’re on small presses, not enough people will read them or not a lot of people will read them, because I think everybody should read them because they are some of the truest, honest books about the human psyche that I’ve ever read.
There’s a paragraph in A Mouthful of Air wherein you describe how Julie is feeling, and I want to read this because I think it’s just so perfect. You write this: “Julie is not sure if this is funny or sad, but it’s the truth, so she tries at least to understand it, and what she’s slowly beginning to acknowledge is that her depression … God, does she hate that word … her sadness, her melancholy, this wish of hers to shut her eyes in the hope of everything fading to black is not something that’s ever going to go away. There will be times that it will subside, a happy Sunday, a few happy Sundays, but be assured it will come back at her again.”
Amy, I know that this is not the case for you. You’ve written this about your own experience of depression: “It’s been 21 years now and I’ve been mostly good. I’ve had a couple of little blips, times when I’ve needed my medication adjusted, even fairly recently, although for the most part, I’ve been holding steady. This doesn’t mean that I’m not scared that it will come back. The crippling sadness will return. It’s physiological. But what I know now that I didn’t know 21 years ago is that with the love of my little family and proper medical care, I’ll get through it, as most of us do. Movies, books, art and time heal if you hold on long enough.”
I think that those two sort of bookend comments, those bookend pieces of your writing, really reflect everything that you’re trying to do with your work. And I was wondering, sort of as we get ready to close the show, if there’s anything else that you might want to share with our listeners about living with or understanding profound depression.
Amy Koppelman:
Just two days ago … I hadn’t been with my whole family together … we hadn’t all been together in the same spot and we went and we visited my daughter at college, and we were all laughing or whatever. I was walking down the street … it’s funny that you said that. I said to myself, “I don’t want everything to cut to black right now.” I mean, I just said … I mean, it was just like two days ago. That would have been one of the kind of moments where I would have been like, “OK, if everything just went to black now …” The idea of how painful the goodbye is, that still crushes me on a daily basis, this idea that we’re all born, at whatever age it is, you realize that everyone you love is going to be taken away from you. And the idea that you’re still supposed to love in spite of that, you’re still supposed to continue in spite of that, knowing that you’re going to hit this amount of pain that is inconceivable … and if you’re lucky, it’ll be in the right order. God forbid your children don’t die before you, your parents die before. Hopefully you’ll be spared the real tragedies of the wrong order, right?
Debbie Millman:
Yes.
Amy Koppelman:
It’s still something I work on all the time. It’s also that I’m always looking over my shoulder, and so because I know both those things, I just try to have … people always overuse the word “gratitude,” but I try to have that for every moment that I’m OK, no different than somebody who’s had cancer and their cancer is in remission. That is still how I feel, just grateful for every day to be alive, that I got to see all the things that I saw, even the terrible things that I’ve seen in the past couple years and see on the streets just walking here. But that I survived, that I’m OK, that I’m here, I’m always grateful for that. And I guess the thing that bothers me the most about Julie’s life or the movie is that she missed so much. She missed her entire family grow up. She missed every ballet recital, every, “Oh no, should I break up with my boyfriend?” Every skinned knee …
Debbie Millman:
Baseball game, yeah.
Amy Koppelman:
… baseball game. She missed all of it. Fear of COVID, she missed all of it. I just don’t want people to give up because you just miss so much. And if you can just make it through and somehow ask for help and not feel ashamed … Be your own phone call. The phone call that didn’t come, the knock on the door that didn’t come …
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, the knock on the door.
Amy Koppelman:
If somehow, in some tiny, teeny, teeny, tiny way, Amanda and I through this movie can just make people understand you’re really not nearly as bad as you think you are and you really didn’t do anything wrong—that’s my hope.
Debbie Millman:
Thank you, Amy. Thank you. Amy Koppelman, thank you so much for bringing so much candid, honest, important work into the world, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters. Amy Koppelman’s latest film is titled A Mouthful of Air and it will be released to the world in October. You can see more about Amy’s three novels, her writing, her films at amykoppelman.com.
This is the 17th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.