We are taking ‘Fleabag’ to the Edinburgh Festival which is the play that I wrote in 2013
and we took up to the festival originally and it was the play that then ended up, we ended up turning it into a TV show.
Three nights ago I ordered myself a very slutty pizza.
I mean, the bitch was dripping.
That dirty little stuffed-crust wanted to be in me so bad I just ate the little tart like she meant nothing to me and she loved it.
The show is a story about a young woman who has a relationship with the audience
that she is telling her own story to and it’s about the last few nights and days of her life
and she talks to them as though they are very close friends,
that she wants them to come into her world to hear about how hilarious it is
and how funny these things are that have happened to her.
But you start, through accidental kind of revelations when she talks,
to realise that the picture is not all as she wants you to think it is.
Suddenly I was on YouPorn having a horrible wank. Found just the right sort of gangbang
and that really knocked me out so I put my computer away,
leaned over, kissed my boyfriend Harry goodnight and went to sleep.
I woke in the morning to find a note from Harry saying,
'that was the last straw', which is a bit out of the blue to be honest,
didn’t realise he was counting straws but nice to know he was paying attention.
I thought it was going to be quite hard as a performer to let go of this character
and when we had to start auditioning people for the role, and then Maddie walked in the room
and Maddie Rice is performing it in Edinburgh and she was just so wonderful and made the whole play completely her own.
The character has been through a lot of grief and loss and she’s completely covered it up
and so the play, it’s a comedy with a sort of horrible punch at the end.
I sit on the loo and think about all the people I can have sex with now.
I’m not obsessed with sex. I just can’t stop thinking about it.
The performance of it, the awkwardness of it, the drama of it.
There would in her life, as with our lives, have been an influx of porn and imagery through the media
that would have potentially connected with her on a very emotional level
and been potentially damaging in the way that it was presented.
I find my sister outside the lecture hall.
She’s uptight and beautiful, probably anorexic but clothes look awesome on her.
Mum died two years ago.
She had a double mastectomy but never really recovered.
It was particularly hard because she had amazing boobs.
She used to say I was lucky because mine would never ‘get in the way’.
And when I asked her what she meant she used to demonstrate by pretend-struggling to open the fridge door.
Or, pretending to not be able to see what’s on the floor, ‘Oh, nightmare!’
It’s very universal and truthful and it’s something that just manages to capture something that we haven’t heard before
because it feels so honest and it feels very visceral and real and secret.
Dad’s way of coping with two motherless daughters was to buy us tickets to feminist lectures,
start fucking our godmother and eventually stop calling.
I feel like it's resonated because, and I’ve thought about this a lot,
because on one level, it felt very authentic to all of us making this show
and when I was writing it I felt like there was something truthful in this woman’s life,
this woman’s pain, this woman’s humour.
But I think the character has such a front, a front that was so well designed to entertain and to deflect anyone’s attention
and I think people can relate to that, that she’s hiding so much with this real bravado,
and I think especially in cities, and especially women I think,
although a lot of men have said the same thing, have this kind of outer shell of,
‘I’m absolutely fine, I can deal with this and more than that I can make jokes through it and I can be knowing and clever and smart’
and then feeling this kind of tremor underneath of, ‘but I’m so lonely and life’s so sad’
and that, ‘I want more from the sex in my life’
or ‘I want more from the relationships with my family or friends'
and that is, I think it’s that people could see how hard she was working to hide that
that other people could relate to.