She imagined such a woman as a young child. ” - AmazonĪfter her losing her mother when she was just a toddler and having a stepmother who never wanted kids, Amanda wanted someone to love her always and never leave. Whatever the case, as the violence of her erratic behavior increases, Amanda knows that she must act to put her life right, or see it destroyed. A book on demon possession suggests that the figure on the shore could be the demon Naamah, known to scholars of the Kabbalah as the second wife of Adam, who stole into his dreams and tricked him into fathering her child. The new voice in Amanda’s head, the one that tells her to steal things and talk to strange men in bars, is strange and frightening, and Amanda struggles to wrest back control of her life.

At night she dreams of a beautiful woman with pointed teeth on the shore of a blood-red sea. She starts smoking again, and one night for no reason, without even the knowledge that she’s doing it, she burns her husband with a cigarette. Amanda-a successful architect in a happy marriage-finds her life going off kilter by degrees. A memo to her boss that’s replaced by obscene insults. I thought I’ll do the comedy on the stage, and I’ll make the tragedy version offstage.“A recurrent, unidentifiable noise in her apartment. The whole play is catalyzed by this hidden desire. And one goes down the road of comedy, and one goes down the road of tragedy-but it starts with that desire. They take this wild, transgressive action in order to make it so. That got me thinking about Macbeth, because for me there’s this connection between the two: Macbeth and Helen both have a desire that can’t be realized within the world of the play. She’s so polarizing she’s a villainess and she’s also heroic. She is this kind of orphan-wrench girl, who has an incredible desire for a man, and she turns the world of the play upside-down, in order to get what she wants. The heroine seemed really disturbing to me-so single-minded and pushy and powerful in ways other heroines in her position (she’s an orphan) wouldn’t really be. I became very attached to All’s Well That Ends Well. At the time, given what I was going through, those reversals of fortune-those kinds of possibilities-became exciting to me. I think part of the reason why is because Shakespeare has these incredible reversals of fortune. I was in a Shakespeare class and so compelled by the plays. I was struggling with chronic pain when I was a graduate student.

It’s interesting because the question of Shakespeare and then the question of pain, which the book deals with a lot, are intertwined for me personally. I was like cool, I’m sold, let’s go! Why Shakespeare? And why these particular plays?

I remember just seeing just the blurb that you were writing a Shakespeare book. Drew: I was so excited when this book got announced.

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