Artist Statement 

The universal theme I am exploring in She Said/She Said was famously described by William Faulkner, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

I was inspired to write She Said/She Said after I googled my long-estranged half-sister whom I haven’t seen or spoken to since she was 2 and I was 14, after an incident similar to the one described in the script.  I found very little about her online, but what I did find was interesting – a video of her performing at a storytelling event in Washington DC (where our father lives). Everything I write is grounded in my own lived experience and starts with the question ‘What if?’ Since I was a frequent attendee at The Moth in NYC, it got me thinking - What if I went to a storytelling event and learned my father had died by recognizing him as the subject of a story and realizing the storyteller was my half-sister?  

For 10 years before I moved to LA, I lived in an apartment in Brooklyn below a family of three women: elderly grandmother, bipolar mother, teenage daughter. I would often hear the mother unleashing torrential verbal abuse on both her shy teenage daughter and ailing mother in the middle of the night. I wanted to do something to help, but having experience with social services and family court (my mother practiced as a guardian ad litem in family court for years), taught me that it could make this girl’s life even worse if I reported her mother to authorities. I felt both helpless and guilty for failing to figure out how to help, and I realized that mix of emotions mirrored how I had felt for years after I stopped seeing my father and half-sister. I am also all-too familiar with how much past trauma and the feelings of powerlessness, guilt, and shame can paralyze me and negatively affect my creative output.  

As a survivor of early childhood domestic violence, I am passionate about realizing on screen the story and characters I created on the page. I believe this story of a woman coming to terms with childhood trauma and finding her own voice as she approaches middle-age can contribute on a cultural scale, as stories that center complex, three-dimensional individual women are still underrepresented in cinema and television.