‘Nothing about pregnancy is not violent,” says Amber Tamblyn. “Nothing. From the minute you find out and you’re puking everywhere, to the thoughts that run through your head about the things you imagine doing if someone harmed your child.” Pregnancy, she adds, can make you feral.
In a sun-drenched restaurant in Brooklyn, we are discussing the 35-year-old’s debut novel, Any Man. It is a dark piece of experimental fiction about a female serial rapist. Tamblyn, a poet, activist and actor (she starred in the films The Ring and The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants and as the title character in the TV series Joan of Arcadia), wrote the bulk of the novel while pregnant with her first child. Some of the book’s darkness, she says, is a product of this, borne from a “shadow part” of herself that she experienced for the first time while pregnant. Part of [the book’s] brutality came from “carrying a woman inside of me, in 2016, during that particular election year”.
Released last week, Any Man has already caused a stir; Tamblyn’s decision to make the rapist a woman and to write from the point of view of the rapist’s six male victims has upset some people. “I think they see it as I’m just reversing the gender roles,” she says, “and I’m [taking] away the experience of women and giving it to men. That’s OK. They can feel that way.” However, Tamblyn stresses, “this is not about reversing gender roles”. It’s about having “more difficult conversations about what sexual assault looks like. I mean, one of the greatest gripes about the #MeToo movement was that it was not inclusive,” that it focused too much on privileged, white, cis women. “And I agree.” Any Man’s focus was, in part, a rallying cry to pay more attention to male victims. More than that, however, Tamblyn wanted to provoke people into paying more attention to rape culture in general. “This was very much about resensitising a conversation and finding a way to talk about sexual assaults in a way that didn’t make everyone yawn.”
You can’t talk about a new novel that deals with sexual assault without looking at it through the lens of #MeToo, particularly when the author made waves last year after accusing Oscar-nominated actor James Woods of preying on her when she was 16 (Woods denies the allegations). Tamblyn is also one of the founders of Time’s Up, an organisation launched at the beginning of this year to fight sexual harassment in the film industry.
However, Tamblyn’s decision to make her antagonist a woman did not start with an intention to expand the conversation around sexual assault. When she first started toying with writing a novel four years ago, long before Harvey Weinstein was exposed, she began with the observation that it is rare to see a truly awful female antagonist. Someone who is “doing things without consequence and for no other reason than she just enjoyed them. For so many movies and books, if there is a female antagonist, they’re usually doing something to get back at someone. There has to be a redeemable quality, no matter how small. Even if it’s their prettiness.”
The shadowy figure at the centre of Any Man, Maude, doesn’t have any redeeming features. No tragic past or attractive face; she doesn’t conform to the “rules” for women. You could say Tamblyn set out to break down the boundaries society has placed around Every Woman. Maude is not meant to be a believable, three-dimensional character but, rather, “a sort of projection of all of society’s dehumanising of women”. Tamblyn takes “the terms and the words that are used to describe [powerful women] and create a woman that is those literal things”. The name Maude, she says, was a deliberate choice. “It’s very bland and I wanted her name, in a way, to have nothing to say. I wanted her amorphousness to come even in the form of her title.”
Writing Any Man was cathartic. While Tamblyn says she has never been sexually assaulted “in any of the ways” in the book, she knows what it is like to be a victim of sexual violence. She has spoken openly, for example, about an ex-boyfriend who assaulted her at a nightclub in Hollywood, dragging her out of the venue “by my private parts”.Writing Any Man was also physically painful. “I had really severe carpal tunnel syndrome and De Quervain syndrome in both arms … if I typed for long periods of time, my arms would go numb. My hands would go numb, part of my cheek would go numb.” This was partly due to pregnancy and the repetitive strain of typing, but she thinks there was also a psychological element. “I think if Carl Jung were examining this, he would say that I was also possibly breaking out of some sort of a physical cast that I had been in my entire life. Perhaps it was actually my body attempting to feel for the first time.”
Tamblyn started acting when she was 11. She grew up saying other people’s words and feeling other people’s feelings, being watched without truly being seen. “I think my experience growing up was one of long-term varied objectification,” she says. “All I’ve ever done is act. Even though there were so many other things swirling in my head.”
She started getting that swirl on to paper a few years ago. In 2015, Tamblyn released a poetry collection called Dark Sparkler, about the lives and deaths of child actors. All of a sudden, she had physical ailments that “seemed to come out of nowhere”. But they did not really, she notes. “It has occurred to me that someone should do a study on artists who have to emote for a living and what that does to the central nervous system.”
Of course, it is not just actors who emote for a living. Being a woman has traditionally meant demonstrating the right sort of emotions: smiling on demand, being polite, internalising your anger Lately, however, the anger has been uncorked. From Nasty Woman T-shirts to the #MeToo movement, women aren’t afraid of proclaiming how pissed off they are. How they are sick of having our bodies and emotions policed. That anger has bubbled up in pop culture. While reading Any Man, I was reminded of Dietland, a bestselling novel by Sarai Walker, recently turned into a TV show, which features a shadowy vigilante feminist group known only as “Jennifer” that murders predatory men.
Tamblyn has not heard of Dietland and is careful to stress that Any Man is not a revenge fantasy. “Yes, there’s a lot of anger,” she says, but “I want to look past the anger at what is underneath it. And what is underneath it is a lack of empathy. When you don’t feel seen, you, of course, get furious, which I think is how a lot of women have felt for a long time.” Tamblyn carefully distinguishes sympathy from empathy. Sympathy, she says, is being able to rationalise why someone did something. Empathy, however, is “connecting with people on a larger whole, with who they are. Part of the huge disconnect within the #MeToo movement, for example – and it is very wild that this book was written so long before it – is that men can sympathise with women, but I don’t know that they empathise. They don’t know how to. This experience is really forcing men to empathise with the daily experience of womanhood.”
Rape culture and gender inequality is not about men versus women, Tamblyn says. We all need to empathise more and interrogate our own complicity. “I think liberals do that. In this country, they do it too much, to the point where it harms them. And conservatives don’t do it at all. To the point where it harms them.”
It would be hard to talk about complicity without mentioning Tamblyn’s husband, the comedian David Cross, who plays Tobias Fünke in the sitcom Arrested Development. In May, a New York Times interview with the cast of Arrested Development was held up as a disturbing demonstration of how complicity works. When the interviewer brought up accusations of sexual misconduct (which he denies) and harassment against the cast member Jeffrey Tambor, Jessica Walter (who plays Lucille Bluth) spoke tearfully about how Tambor had yelled at her on set. The male actors, including Cross, quickly rallied to Tambor’s defence, talking over Walter and minimising her experience.
“I have thoughts [on that], but they will stay with me,” Tamblyn says. But, she says, “you better believe that those type of actions are not going without some pretty intense, private conversations. There are many men that are like that. They just don’t understand what they did wrong until they’ve done it and then someone shows them.”
And, again, she says, that is really the point of Any Man: to show, not tell. To show the violence of objectification; the physical and psychological violence of assault; the violence of not being believed.
“To find a way to get people who have been blind their whole lives to see. That is the work. That is the only way that things can change.”
