I think the “disfigurement” that Japan inflicted was less the idea of disfigurement, and more the idea of mystery. I’ve managed to finish all that I’… - Susan Choi

I was also interested in what it’s like to experience in a really vivid and authentic-seeming way agency and choice in a circumstance that you might later in your life view completely differently, because as much as you were experiencing agency and choice, you were actually in a radically disempowered situation you weren’t even experienced enough to recognize. That’s why I think consent is such a complicated issue.

The voice tends to come first and then everything else follows. It’s never worked for me to think, here’s a character and they should have this kind of voice, let me try to force that. If I can’t tap into a character’s voice, I can’t really write the character…

I think that there's every reason for a young woman to feel very strongly that allying herself with a powerful man, regardless of how she has to do it, might be her path forward — might sometimes be her only path forward. And forming that alliance may be a decision she makes when she is less experienced, and a decision that she is able to recognize for how compromised it was later in life, but we still have to recognize that there's this whole baked-in social and cultural structure that's pointing her toward that decision. Just identifying all the "bad men" and putting them into a time-out isn't really going to address the ways in which sexism is baked into our society.