Zoe Kurland

Or yes, I don't know.

The bra did do some kind of job, pushing my flesh together and up.

I showed my boyfriend the contraption, breast apparatus.

What do you think?

By the way, he asked me to pitch shift his voice for anonymity.

long long long hearing this reaction from totally anonymous focus group participant number one i had an acute experience of body horror imagining my long breasts animated like a looney tunes cartoon extending from my chest like headlight beams further and further wrapping twice around the circumference of the earth

When I was studying film in college, I read a book by the film theorist Marianne Duan about femme fatales.

She wrote, In a sense, she has power despite herself.

Walking around town with broad-up boobs, I wasn't sure how to harness their power.

In a tank top, they were enormous and felt like a malevolent parasite.

Sentient puppets affixed to my body with their own thing going on.

I felt, on some level, slightly unreal, like I was looking at myself from the outside, watching myself like a character in a movie.

What was her story?

Truth be told, it seemed less like the intrepid exploits of a woman in stilettos fighting the power, and more like the tale of a sturdy lass working the barley fields, churning butter.

Not exactly what I was going for.

When my dad told me the story of making the Erin look, he'd said the hard part was making her feel real.

And not just to the people watching the movie, but to Julia herself.

Now, I also had to create an Erin Brockovich that was true to her, but also that Julia Roberts could perform something that she, a skin that she felt comfortable in also.

I went back to the interviews with Julia, and I felt like I could kind of hear what my dad was talking about, that Julia had to find a place between the real Erin and the real her and get used to it.

I wondered what that process was like for Julia.