Desiree Akhavan’s Second Coming of Age
Ten years ago, Desiree Akhavan thought she had figured life out. At just 30 years old, she had written, directed, and starred in a film, Appropriate Behavior, that premiered at Sundance. Everyone wanted to work with her. She no longer felt like the loser she always imagined herself to be.
It was the height of the personal essay boom and Akhavan did what any enterprising person would at the time: she sold a book of essays, billed “a guide for misfits” on how to achieve your dreams. A decade later, that book, You’re Embarrassing Yourself: Stories of Love, Lust, and Movies, is hitting the shelves.
But the project doesn’t exactly fit its original billing. It evolved alongside Akhavan as she hit what she described as her “a second coming-of-age” in her thirties. At first, Akhavan was too busy to write the book. The show she created, wrote, starred in and directed, The Bisexual, was greenlit shortly after she sold the collection, as was The Miseducation of Cameron Post, a film she adapted from a novel and directed. Both projects were met with acclaim, but after their premieres, Akhavan says she was gripped by “crippling despair.”
Suddenly, in her thirties, with success and a Sundance Grand Jury Prize under her belt, Akhavan had lost her voice and direction. In the meantime, she got a “day job,” as she describes it, as an episodic director for hit shows like Hacks while trying to figure out what she wanted to say. Life, she realized, “isn’t just this one-and-done deal.”
“This process of finding your voice, which you thought was so finite, is ever-evolving,” Akhavan tells PAPER. “And that’s what I wanted to talk about in the book, about this constant shift of ego, shift of power, shift of identity.”
Akhavan’s essays are honest, funny and often unflinching tales of growing up, and then growing some more. They grapple with a history of eating disorders and self-harm, meditate on coming-of-age as a queer, Iranian child of immigrants and trace how she fell in love with film. They also talk about feeling very lost in a decade when you’re supposed to have your life figured out. Akhavan’s stories don’t tie everything up in a neat bow, but they do chart a path forward. And while the original conceit of the book surely would have been good, Akhavan has created something better. “My dream is to carve this path back to where I started,” she says of her career journey. The book, out now, is a great start.
You started writing this book in 2014 as a guide for misfits about overcoming adversity, but then you wrote that your “swan life soured” and the purpose of the book changed. Can you tell me more about its evolution?
It was a really long time. It’s strange because I still think there is something there from the original conceit as a guide for misfits. “Guide” is too strong of a word. I definitely don’t think anybody should follow my advice or that I’m giving a lot of advice in the book. But I think that my perspective on everything changed over my thirties. I sold this at 30 and now I’m 39 and I finished writing it at 38.
What happened was I sold it and then life kept happening — The Miseducation of Cameron Post went into production, The Bisexual went into production, they both kind of got greenlit around the same time and then that ate up the next few years, and then the crippling despair that followed ate up the next few years. So it was like a perfect storm of all these obstacles and it became stories about finding your voice in your youth and then stories about refinding your voice as an adult.
Were your publisher and editor understanding about the delays? Or was there pressure to submit a draft?
They were incredibly patient, I was really lucky. More patient than I would’ve been. I would’ve been like, It’s over, give up. And there were moments where I was like, Do I do this? and I realized that I had something to say about this age. I think there is a second puberty, a second coming-of-age. Something happened at 30 after my first film came out. I don’t mean to be self-deprecating, but I always felt like such a loser for so long and so at the bottom of the totem pole. And then I made this film [Appropriate Behavior] and suddenly my life changed really drastically, really quickly, and I was like, Oh, I guess this is it. I guess you just come into your own. And in my later thirties, I really had this feeling like, Oh, life keeps shifting, life keeps, changing, stakes keep changing, status keeps changing. It isn’t just this one-and-done deal, and this process of finding your voice, which you thought was so finite, is ever-evolving. And that’s what I wanted to talk about in the book, about this constant shift of ego, shift of power, shift of identity.
Were there books you turned to for inspiration when writing?
So many. So so many. I’ve read a lot of memoirs and I particularly like to listen to authors read their own memoirs. Patti Smith, in particular, is an excellent reader. I preferred listening to her read Year of the Monkey to reading it on text. Tina Fey’s Bossypants made me want to write this in the first place. When I started this, Not That Kind of Girl [by Lena Dunham] had just come out and that was inspiring. And Autobiography of a Face [by Lucy Grealy] was also really inspiring. Anything by Sheila Heti. I really went through a lot of phases. I’d read something and write a chapter in the vein of that performer. I was constantly reading and listening to memoirs. It was like putting on people’s skin and asking, “What are the voices of these various texts? How do you express yourself in this format?” Because it was a really different format. I think I was so naive going into this. I was like, I write autofiction. I starred in my own film. I know what it is to make something personal — and I had no clue. I got my ass kicked doing this. It’s just a different format and I found it to be a lot more vulnerable and exposing raw than film.
I wanted to ask about that, because you made autofictional film and television before, but this book feels, from my perspective, like your most honest and raw work. Do you feel like that’s part of why it took you so long to write it?
For sure. When you make a film so many other hands touch it and it becomes their work as well and you all kind of build something larger than the sum of its parts. And to me, that’s the most satisfying, exciting process. This is very different. It’s isolating, and it stops with you. And that is great on one hand, it’s just your vision. And on the other hand, I think that my vision was always made so much stronger by my collaborators. And that was really hard. I think that was also what was hard about saying “enough is enough” and “this is done.” Because usually I have so many other voices involved by that stage, and we’ve built something that’s gone on such a journey that it feels like a natural end. Whereas this was sort of like pulling out the plug abruptly and being like, “We’re running out of time, let’s just do this.”
After reading the book, I went back and rewatched The Bisexual and I realized some of the details from your life that you write about were also given to Leila, the character you played. She was also in a self-harm support group and there was the scene where she’s with a straight man who is homophobic to a bouncer, which happened to you. What was it like returning to those moments in your writing that you had already explored on screen?
In The Bisexual, those things felt like such brief moments. That show was such a fever dream. It just came and went so quickly, and those moments in the script that reference personal things never went into the depth of those experiences, so it felt appropriate. The only one where I was like, Am I milking this too much? was the bouncer one. I was like, Come on, Desiree. You’ve used the story before. But it really did feel emblematic of that moment in my life when I was dating a lot of men and feeling weird about it.
My friends and I were big fans of The Bisexual when it came out and I was surprised to learn from your book that the show was renewed for a second season, but you chose not to make it. I was wondering if you could speak a little more to the decision not to make another season. I think it will surprise a lot of readers, since I don’t think you’ve ever spoken about it publicly.
A lot of things went wrong while making that show. And I felt, I don’t know, it’s really hard to talk about. I want to find the right words and to be respectful to everyone involved. It was a really painful experience. And when we got renewed, it just didn’t feel sustainable. But now that I look back — I’ve been working in television for like six years as a director-for-hire — I was just very green.
But a lot of things went wrong. It was a perfect storm. It was a particularly cursed shoot, and I was very inexperienced, and I was doing too much. If I could go back in time, I would hire a director to direct it. I wouldn’t have starred and directed at the same time, because television is different from filmmaking, and for me, it wasn’t possible to do both those jobs physically — to star and be in every scene and to direct it. It was just really taxing. And I think about that choice that I made very often, because it led me down a certain path.
Honestly, I do believe that you make choices for a reason, and there’s always something your intuition is telling you and my institution was telling me I had to close that door and I’m still learning why. Because I look back and I’m like, That would have been so fun. Why didn’t you continue” I was very proud of those scripts. I maybe felt like I lost control of the show, and at that moment, control was really important to me. And I was like, I can’t do this anymore. But now that I look back, I think, Obviously, you could’ve. I needed everything to be perfect, and now I’m getting a little more comfortable with imperfection.
You write really candidly about grappling with success and the ups and downs of the industry. I was struck when you wrote about wanting to make history after you won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance, but then a few pages later wrote that “but now you’ve been seen, and it’s terrifying.” What’s your relationship with filmmaking and television today?
At the moment, I see episodic directing as my day job, and film is this thing that I am prodding my steps toward. But also, I have the Farsi language movie that [Cecilia Frugiuele] and I were working on in the book. That’s pretty much done.
I wanted to ask about that!
That’s pretty much done, and we’re making it with BBC Film. So we’re close to putting it together. So ideally, knock wood, inshallah, we’ll go into production in early 2025. We’re planning to shoot it in Greece. I’m really excited it’s happening. My dream is to carve this path back to where I started. And in the meantime, we’re also developing a lesbian rom-com with Big Beach and Michael Clark, who produced Cameron Post. One film is this Farsi-language drama and the other is this Nora Ephron-esque rom-com and they couldn’t be more different. And I think that’s exciting, this idea of finding your voice in these extremes.
I’m not sure how much you can tell me, but do you plan on acting in either of them?
I do not. I think if I feel called to act again, it will happen. But at this moment in my life, I just really want to get back to my own voice and crafting and shaping things on my own again. I think [directing] television has been really fantastic. I like this job. I’ve learned so much coming in and watching other people work and helping them achieve their vision. It’s gratifying in that way. And I’ve met really incredible people, and I’d like to apply this experience I’ve had to my own work.
That makes a lot of sense, particularly in the context of how difficult making The Bisexual was for you.
Yes, if I didn’t star in it, it would have been an entirely different experience. But at the same time, I can’t imagine who I would have cast to play that part. I know there are amazing actors out there. I think it became part of the work itself, the fact that it was me.
And in the projects you starred in, were you writing them with yourself as the star in mind?
Yeah, and I’m not anymore.
How does that change the way that you write and imagine characters?
It’s a huge change, and it’s taken years to figure that out, and I think that’s why I’ve been sitting with these scripts for so long, like the rom-com and the Iran film have been with me for six or seven years now. I used to pop out a script a year. I don’t understand why it’s so hard for me to get through these, but I think I am changing and growing and evolving into a different voice. And before it was like, taking my own life and chewing it up and spitting it out, and now trying to elevate or graduate into something different.
With so much changing since the book was first sold and so many complicated feelings surrounding your voice and work, how does it feel now to be putting out this book?
It’s absolutely terrifying, and I think you just have to trust that it’s fine. And do what my father says, which is, “Fuck them if they can’t take a joke.” I think I have this problem of taking everything way too seriously. I’m a Capricorn and I am a classic Capricorn. My grip is too tight and I’m too serious and I think it’s a really good exercise and letting go and being like, Yeah, this is humiliating. This is a book of humiliating moments. I literally called it that, and I’m putting it into the world. And I’m also not a prose writer, I’m a screenwriter. This is not something that I do, and it’s the most vulnerable I’ve ever felt because.
People always said when Appropriate Behavior came out, “Oh, you’re so brave. I can’t believe you put yourself out there like that.” And I was kind of insulted, because it was like, What do you think I should be embarrassed about? I was so proud of it. And it was, to me, craft. It was storytelling. I never saw that as my life even though I will be the first to admit that it’s super duper personal. It definitely was a version of me, but I did not feel vulnerable or like it was me on the line. And yet, with a book, there’s just nowhere to hide. Like that is 1,000% my voice and my stories, and it’s a very different feeling, a very different experience, for sure.
I think that’s the thing that I’m nervous about. Not necessarily the truth of what happened, the truth of my nose job or my bulimia or my sex life. Those things don’t shame me. I think it being navel-gazy or uncompelling worries me, because it’s so personal. With film, there’s craft of filmmaking to fall back on, where you’re like, It’s entertainment. Deal with it. I know it’s funny, or I know it’s good. I can sit in the room and feel people laugh. I can sit and witness it. Whereas with a book, you can’t really witness that. You don’t know how it plays. You just put this thing out in the world, and you just have to hope. And that is the whole vulnerability of this experience. Hoping to have created something that justifies its existence.
Photography: Cecilia Frugiuele
Ten years ago, Desiree Akhavan thought she had figured life out. At just 30 years old, she had written, directed, and starred in a film, Appropriate Behavior, that premiered at Sundance. Everyone wanted to work with her. She no longer felt like the loser she always imagined herself to be. It was the height of…