In Nothing Without Me (Random House, Apr.), Monks Takhar explores the vicissitudes of fame through the eyes of fledgling director April and disgraced film star Essie.
What inspired Nothing Without Me?
It was a confluence of stuff. Watching what happened to Britney Spears—the normalization of what she was put through and then subsequently had to get out of, with her conservatorship. Reading interviews about what it’s like to traverse banks of paparazzi photographers. I was also interested in what makes us unable to tear away from this massive hyper-scrutiny of female bodies and female lives when they’re celebrities. Why am I clicking on these stories? I’ve internalized so much misogyny; I wanted to play in that dirt.
Has writing this book changed your view of the film industry?
It solidified things that have been bubbling away in my mind: tales I’ve heard of the struggles of female directors getting their projects made. My little weirdo, April—she’s got something to say, and she really wants to say it, and she’s super bright, and she works real damn hard, and it’s still an uphill struggle. And that is, I understand, quite a typical experience of female filmmakers, both here in the U.K. and in the U.S.
Thus far, all of your books have dealt, in some fashion, with being publicly visible—or invisible—as a woman. Did you intentionally set out to explore that theme, or did it emerge as you wrote?
It was doing the author’s note for this book that made me think, ah, there’s something linking all of this. This one is about female visibility, for sure, but it is also about how demigoddesses make us feel about ourselves. Most of us in life meet these women that just seem to have “it”—this elixir of charisma, beauty, and togetherness. And you’re in awe, you want to be close to it and bask in the reflected glory, but it also a little makes you feel like shit. And that gets writ large in the celebrity space.
Your female characters are often messy, ambitious, and insecure. Have you ever felt pressure to make them more likable?
The L word! Not from my editors, and not from my agent, but it does interest me that a lot of readers that maybe don’t connect with my work have an issue with unlikable women. And that’s okay, that’s their prerogative. If you want stories of women behaving nicely and kindly, then I’m not your writer. We’re not supposed to be together.
