They hate wearing dresses and love skateboarding, and that’s about all we get to know about them. They’re a bubbly kid who (like me) aligns with pretty much the only representation nonbinary people get to see on TV: white, assigned female at birth, someone who would’ve just been called a tomboy a generation ago. Rock is a rare character in whose life I see my own, or at least a hypothetical coming-out future for myself that I can relate to. While I’m still not out to my family or many other people, the opposite is true for Charlotte’s 12-year-old child, Rock, who features in a storyline about their budding gender identity-and their parents’ contention of it. And of all the shows out there, it’s this heteronormative dramedy that nails that particular fear-to its detriment. If And Just Like That is any proof, it’s just as plausible that my coming-out moment could become not about me but other people’s reactions to the powerful declaration of the identity I’m trying to share with them. In And Just Like That, I somehow found the thing that makes me most anxious about coming out to my family as non-binary reflected right back at me: the chance that I’ll be de-centered from my own experience. I had to discuss it with them, I said, because no matter how much I agreed that the show is otherwise not worth the screentime, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. My therapist laughed and said no they had tried to watch the first few minutes, they said, but it was so bad that they couldn’t keep going. So, I love that there’s now a group of people making this more diverse and inclusive.Starting a therapy session by asking my therapist if they’ve seen the Sex And The City reboot, And Just Like That, is not a moment I’m proud of, yet here we are. And these are things I wouldn’t have known how to do. That’s because there’s really smart, wonderful women, in the writers’ room, of Indian descent. I mean, the scenes that you see in S eason 2, of the Haldi c eremony, that didn’t come up in a vacuum. It’s an incredibly diverse group of people. But what you’re not seeing is who’s in the writer’s room, who’s in the director’s chair. We’ve got Regé-Jean Page there and we’ve got Simone Ashley there. That’s the thing about television, it’s such a collaborative process that we can talk all about- Oh, this is so revolutionary. And also, even if I tried, I couldn’t have done it as well. Overall, the thing I feel most is gratitude, because they were able to do something that, honestly, I didn’t know how to do. I think it’s great, honestly, the way that Shonda has opened up the Bridgerton world. And so, I really thought at the time that it would be disrespectful to try to go into history and pretend that these terrible things had not happened. Because the last thing I ever want to do is whitewash history in a way that removes Black people from spaces where they actually were. I also think that I was under the apprehension, at the time, that in order to really honor Black history-well, I mean, there are obviously many other marginalized groups, but, to your question, Black history-you had to be truthful about the various traumas and the history. It has definitely coalesced into something that’s not entirely accurate, but I certainly was not articulate in my thoughts. So, in 2017, I spoke awkwardly about race. Obviously, this is a boiled-down quote that’s been passed down telephone-style from multiple different sources, so I’d love to hear your side on that. Allegedly, you said that you don’t write Black characters in your historical fiction because you don’t want to write about characters who are suffering. I do have to ask this, because I’ve seen some talk of this online: A paraphrased quote from you is floating around the internet, sourced from people who attended book events in 2017 in which you were a panelist. She knows what she’s doing.” And obviously she did! And she basically did the same thing for me, which was an honor, to be honest, to be a recipient of that trust. Because, I said, “Look, I’m not going to tell Shonda Rhimes how to make television. It was really exactly what happened with Bridgerton, when I retained no creative control. I know how to write a television script.” It was a huge compliment, just the level of trust she had. And I checked in with her a few times, but for the most part, she just said, “You do what you know how to do.” Then she said, “I don’t know how to write a novel. And then I took those scripts and figured out how to turn them into a novel. So she wrote six scripts-two of them she wrote with someone else, but for the most part, she wrote six scripts-then handed them off to me. What we really did was take turns with what we did best and what our expertise is. Well, to be completely frank, I have no direct knowledge of Shonda’s process, because we didn’t work together holed up in a room.
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