I’d gone through a phase of reading all of the thrillers featuring complex women and unreliable narrators, and feeling really into that. How did you conceive her as a character, versus a narrator guiding the reader? She’s an unreliable narrator, in that her emotions are clearly animating and informing her descriptions. One of the advantages of writing this character in a book versus in a show is that you really get to get inside of Abby’s head. It was a labor of love and also a way for me to kind of have a great part to work on. It ended up selling in a big way and it kind of just happened. I sat down every day and I started writing and writing and writing, and then we took the book proposal out. This one thing that I have, that I would never be scared to admit, is that I have a really good work ethic and really good discipline. So I just started writing, and I got really disciplined. So you come out the other end, and I was getting auditions or movie offers where it was always like, a stripper or a wife. It felt like, sure, an act of defiance because my agent said it wouldn’t sell, but maybe also in terms of acting roles that I was looking at after Jessica Jones, it’s a really tough act to follow, with the depths that I get to go to and the psychological searching, uncovering what is required for that role - it’s so great, just an amazing role. So I was kind of in with that, and I had some people in the book world that I’d always been talking to about “Oh, if you ever find the right idea, we’d love to help you.” And so it kind of came about as, like, “Well, let me just pitch them this idea and write a proposal and see where we get from there.” It turned out to be really fun for me and it started to take every minute of my brain, every minute of my time. Yeah! And I’d already had some connections in the publishing world a bit because I had written a book proposal a few years ago.

Bonfire ritter