I love writing female characters.
Actually, let me try that again.
I love writing complicated female characters.

Okay, wait, one more time.

I love writing complicated, raunchy, sexy, dark, unhinged, brash, relatable, hilarious, fierce, playful, crude, sly, unapologetic, multi-faceted, loving, brilliant, phenomenal, emotional female characters. Because, truthfully, I’ve gotten sick of working in an industry where women are too often relegated to roles that are only important insofar as they relate to someone else. Defined by the title of mother, sister, wife, girlfriend, and only necessary as a rest stop on the way during a male character’s journey to self-actualization.
As a young, Jewish girl growing up in Brooklyn (pre-gentrified, mind you. It’s important to me that you know that. My growth as a young writer was inspired by the vast pool of different people who made up my neighborhood. My father spent afternoons playing Black Trivial Pursuit on the corner, while my mother smoked with Mary and Dee, and shouted at me and my friends to get our faces out of the water shooting from the open fire hydrant that had been running for days…but I digress) I gained the nickname “Ears,” because on high holidays I would forgo watching a cartoon in the living room with the other kids, so I could eavesdrop on the women in the kitchen. Women with wants, and dreams, and filled with so much pain and longing that I did not understand.
And while my mother would say the nickname with a smile, I quickly learned that it was just a sugary way of saying, “go watch My Cousin Vinny with Jen and Amanda Thum,” because there was no easy way to answer questions such as: “Ma, was Uncle Tony really wearing a suit to grandma’s house because he’s having an affair?” “Ma, what’s a diaphragm?” “Ma, did dad really sleep in his car when he left us at Grandma and Grandpa’s house on Thanksgiving?”
So, in lieu of asking the questions that were answered with punishments, I took to writing, as a means of putting the puzzle together on my own. I wanted to take this secretive, magical, joyful, heart-wrenching world I watched from the sidelines, and give it as a gift to women who saw themselves disappearing with each passing year. Whose stories matter, despite our society telling them that each rotation of the sun is a mark of depreciation and not transformation. I want them to leave the theater feeling the desire to take up space, forgive themselves, and set themselves free. I want them to see themselves in my words and be reminded that messy stories matter. That their stories matter.
I remember so vividly my mother sitting by the backyard door. Crouched on a plastic child’s chair she had claimed from my toy dining room set, having her breakfast of two cigarettes and black coffee, looking at me under a burst of red hair and saying in her thick, Queens accent, “Danielle, I don’t care what you do. But I hope you never stop writing.”
At the time, I heard those words as kind, maternal encouragement. But now I hear them for what they were: the plea that the dangerous, feisty, sensual, desirous, unstoppable, caged women would not fade into nothingness. That the stories I’d secretly heard as a child would be collected, taken down, and shared in order to bring other women into the light.