And often as filmmakers we ask others to bare their souls and we remain hidden … and I was tired of that … “Okay, here’s my life. I’ll share it with you; that’s my offering to the process.” Also, that was a political statement as a woman. A lot of times, to fit in society, we hide our real lives: we hide our abortions, we hide our affairs with married men, we hide our struggles to get pregnant, our fears … there are so many things we make hidden and what exists instead is this fantasy story which isn’t our lives … so it was also political to say—you’re going to see a real woman’s life with all the warts, all the stupidity, the obsessions, the bad relationships, the problems, but it will be real …
Q. Did any of your friends and family opt out of being filmed?
A. Yes … I don’t reveal the stories of my siblings and I only reveal a very small piece of my family history that I feel relates to why I didn’t want to be a girl. I have some friends who were uncomfortable about being on camera. I have a very good friend who is not in the film … It’s not an accurate portrait, it’s a slice of a part of my life …
Q. Your dad taught you the language of men. He represented freedom, but by the end of the film, your idea of him—and your mother—had evolved. Describe this.
A. I so idolized my dad—partially out of need, to save me from this house of women that I thought would suffocate and imprison me into a narrow female role … so I clutched my dad’s coattails … in a sense it did work. I got out, I got to do what I wanted, I broke all the rules that the women would have imposed on me … but I didn’t look at the negative things …
My parents are both wonderful people, but my dad also has a very skewed vision of women and didn’t always treat my mother very well verbally … And because he didn’t, I also had a skewed vision of women and I adopted his negative view on femaleness. So part of the process was seeing my mother and dad anew. Seeing that the things he’d put down in her were also wonderful female positive things …
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