Emma Hardy

She's a woman who was raped and people could no longer look at her because the amount of pain that she experienced was

felt like it was turning them to stone.

So all of these myths of monsters that we have are really just like emotional women.

And so I started to look at these myths and I was thinking about the ways that I was feeling like I was an emotional woman

and how I kind of felt like society hates emotional women.

We want to see them as monsters.

We want it to be something to be feared, like feeling too much, becoming too angry, devouring too much, consuming too much.

We want that to be like a parable of tragedy.

We want that to be a monstrous thing that we avoid.

And I started to wonder if my own anger might feel more manageable

If I wasn't so scared of it.

And I think that's kind of the question I was grappling with in the book as well is, am I actually scary because this illness is terrifying?

Or is it the cultural ramifications of this illness and the expectations of femininity that are making this illness a lot more scary than it actually needs to be?

Yeah, it was kind of the thing where...

Well, one of my first awarenesses of this tension was like, oh, my mum would be so mad to hear that I'm like taking time off work because I'm about to get my period.

Like my mum would be so upset by that because when she was going through the workplace, that's what she had men tell her all the time in the office that like, oh, she's probably on a whatever.

And she felt like PMS or PMDD were, well not PMDD, she didn't have the language for that then.

But she thought that PMS was like a construct made by men to keep women out of work.

And she'd kind of been pushing against that her whole life.

And so then for me to be feeling so much stress and tension right before I got my period, it was kind of like I was a feminist nightmare and it was like embodied in me.