YouSaid · the spoken record

Amy Twigg

lines on the record: 31
first: 2024-08-13
most recent: 2024-08-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Think would actually quite like to live in an all-female space. So there's been lots of interesting conversations about that as well.”
2024-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · Cults, Communes and Female Rage on the Page, with Amy Twigg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, definitely. I've spoken to people who have escaped similar environments who felt like they had been seen, which is always, you know, a really, that feels good for me as a writer because obviously writing a book about a cult and a commune, I never wanted to feel like any victims of a cult would feel sensationalized or feel like their voices had been stolen in any way. That has been quite reassuring to me. And also, as I mentioned earlier, men have had an amazing respons of the book. I was so worried that, you know, I might be subject to some vitriol online or anything. And I have to say that that hasn't been the case. Men have responded really positively and really kindly to the book. And I think our thinking. About themselves and the way that they live in different ways, which has been lovely. And yes, a lot of women who”
2024-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · Cults, Communes and Female Rage on the Page, with Amy Twigg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess read more in that genre and to... I guess maybe think of new ways, which, you know, is always a good thing. I mean, I definitely think sport creatures can fall into the female rage category. But yes, I just hope that doesn't prevent it from, yeah, I hope it doesn't just stay in its box. Yeah, I don't know if it will allow itself to stay in a box.”
2024-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · Cults, Communes and Female Rage on the Page, with Amy Twigg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I'm always quite hesitant to, I guess, put a label on it because I worry that that might be quite reductive and to sort of... Cram all these very valid issues that might inspire female rage into quite a narrow genre. And just to say it's a female rage book, I do worry sometimes at that. might be a step backwards but we are seeing some absolutely incredible work coming out that could certainly fall into that genre and I think even you know whether it's commercial or literary or experimental or whatever I think actually everyone there are a lot of people working in this space at the minute Yes, I worry that I suppose that work Almost like a commodification of, you know, very valid issues that women and vulnerable minorities are experiencing. But I suppose optimistically speaking, it's a good way for people to.”
2024-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · Cults, Communes and Female Rage on the Page, with Amy Twigg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Questions the idea of the patriarchy and the validity of it. And actually what I found talking to readers is that men have responded to it just as strongly as women because misogyny and tempized misogyny doesn't just affect women. It affects men as well. And often they feel as constrained by it as women do. So this idea of alternate ways of living. Even environmentally speaking, I think we are looking now towards farming our own produce and sort of accepting that this is the only way that we can probably live ethically and commune living itself is on the rise. There are several communes springing up around the UK now. Yeah, I think there is this need to sort of disconnect.”
2024-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · Cults, Communes and Female Rage on the Page, with Amy Twigg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I do feel like we are on the cusp of some great change. I mean, just during the process of writing sport creatures, I started writing it quite seriously during the first lockdown in 2020. And as I was writing it, domestic violence was on the rise. Violence against the trans community just became rife. Roe v. Wade was rolled back. So suddenly what I thought of as actual progress for feminism. You know, I suddenly had this feeling that we were really taking steps backwards. And that certainly where the novel, you know, that's how the novel progressed. So I do think, not even as women, but as just any member of society, I do think we are looking towards an alternate way of living. I feel like obviously the novel...”
2024-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · Cults, Communes and Female Rage on the Page, with Amy Twigg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and just the idea of not being able to sexualize their bodies almost offends the villagers. And so, yeah, there is this idea of trying to take control of the commune in whatever way they can.”
2024-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · Cults, Communes and Female Rage on the Page, with Amy Twigg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's that visual representation of this idea of internalized misogyny where even though the commune sort of begins in good faith, there are always external factors trying to come in. There are always threats pressing against the boundaries of the commune. And part of it, I think, is similarly with Iris and Hazel, this desire to know what's underneath the surface. If you tell somebody, you know, not to look inside a drawer, what's the first thing that this person wants to do? They want to go and look inside the drawer. There's always this fascination with doing things that we're told we cannot do. And so, yeah, I suppose there's definitely the sense of the villagers wanting to control the commune because I think the commune's representation of femininacy disturbs them. They're often, they'll work in the field topless.”
2024-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · Cults, Communes and Female Rage on the Page, with Amy Twigg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, so in the novel, the commune is nestled in the Kent Downs where I grew up, but they are a short drive away from a village. And they do have sort of quite a tenuous relationship with the villagers. They will sell their produce to the villagers, they will even do their gardening for them. But there is, you know, there's a hard and fast rule that there are no men alone in the commune and they're very distrusting of outsiders. And I think, I mean, so much of the novel deals with this, with the idea of internalized misogyny. So even in this all-female space, can we ever actually be free from Guess the patriarchal structure that we live in. And the village and the outside world is really sort of, I guess it is.”
2024-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · Cults, Communes and Female Rage on the Page, with Amy Twigg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Says that sounds, I felt like the only way to write her was to never know, you know, what was a lie, what was the truth. I think that's what makes her. Yeah, I think she was the most exciting character to write.”
2024-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · Cults, Communes and Female Rage on the Page, with Amy Twigg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Certainly motivated by that, but also by the possibility that Hazel offers, Hazel is so non-conforming of so many things, even in the commune itself, she doesn't always behave as the other women behave. You know, she doesn't dress the same way. She doesn't have the same hairstyle. She is almost like this force unto herself. I think that's so difficult actually to meet someone who can do that in life. I think naturally they just become this quite almost mythical creature to us. But I mean, there are still so many things about Hazel that I myself don't know. And I sort of always wanted to keep that distance as a writer from her, I guess, in order to authentically write this character. So there are still, yeah, I think she will always remain a slight mystery to me as pretending.”
2024-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · Cults, Communes and Female Rage on the Page, with Amy Twigg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think the fact that Iris is trying so desperately to find out who she is as a person, I think that plays so strongly into her desire to get to know Hazel and the frustration when Hazel won't reveal herself to Iris, you know, from a narrative point of view, I always knew that Hazel would need to be this alluring character. I think there's nothing more alluring, you know, as people to meet someone and we can't quite get to the crux of who they are. And that naturally makes us want to spend more time with them and have more conversations with them. And probably overstep our boundaries in trying to figure out what somebody's deal is. So I do think Iris' desire to be with Hazel in whatever way is.”
2024-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · Cults, Communes and Female Rage on the Page, with Amy Twigg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I suppose over the course of the novel, really her journey is to find out. Who she is apart from other people. And I think for so many people in my generation, that really feels quite crucial. We have so many external stimuli being thrown at us all the time. And ways to sort of codify ourselves, whether it's, you know, what Hogart's house you're in or what Game of Thrones house you're in. There are all these sort of ways to try and define our personalities, but I don't think these are the things that make us human things that make us human are the things that we experience and we process ourselves. And that's obviously a deeply personal journey. So I think, yeah, I think the journey she goes on is extremely crucial to finding out who she is. And I won't spoil the end of the novel, but I don't know if she does. I think she certainly is on the right track. But, you know, we're all.”
2024-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · Cults, Communes and Female Rage on the Page, with Amy Twigg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's interesting because I always feel like in the beginning of the story, Iris is very much a vessel. She does feel incredibly hollowed out and really the only things in the beginning of the story to define her are really other people, her relationship with her ex-boyfriend, her relationship with her friends, certainly her relationship with her mother. These are all the things that she thinks define her. And so when the possibility of the commune comes along, this kind of just seems like another great thing that will help define her and will help fill her up. And so I think that's one of the reasons that she feels so desperately the need to join this commune. And I think certainly in the beginning, she does find lots of things there that she agrees with and she wants to participate in.”
2024-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · Cults, Communes and Female Rage on the Page, with Amy Twigg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and deny that there was anything wrong with the way that we were being treated. And as you say, like slut shaming and, you know, this kind of manipulation was so prevalent back then, I think, you know, even things like dick pigs, like when we think of those as being relatively recent, you know, they're not. I remember seeing my first one at 11 and being, you know, so just not being able to process it at all. So I think it was an extremely dark time for women in 2008. And I think we see that a lot in the book, you know, just the way that the women's bodies are treated and even the way that they treat themselves and the women treat each other. There is this pressure to conform to, I guess, like these patriarchal standards, whether they agree with them or not, because they feel like maybe things might just be easier for them if they do conform to it.”
2024-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · Cults, Communes and Female Rage on the Page, with Amy Twigg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean so partly I actually wanted to limit the technology that was available in the commune. So I didn't want the characters to have access to smartphones and the kind of social media that we have today. Obviously in 2008 we did have social media, but the access to it wasn't as readily available as it is now. But yeah, I was 18 in 2008 and by that point I think I was sort of proudly declare that I wasn't a feminist and in some way that made me feel like a feminist. I think there was a pressure in that sort of era to you had to appear like a cool girl. You had to be one of the guys and actually if you wanted to have a slightly easier time as a woman, you know, it was a good idea to deny feminism.”
2024-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · Cults, Communes and Female Rage on the Page, with Amy Twigg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With these kinds of stories and like fetishizing them. So yes, I suppose I was exercising some of my own demons, but it didn't come until later on, but now I just, I can't imagine the story without the 2018 branch.”
2024-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · Cults, Communes and Female Rage on the Page, with Amy Twigg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And how actually as a society, we almost forget the violence of it or not even forget about it, but we dismiss it because it suddenly becomes entertainment, it suddenly becomes something that we can talk, you know, we can talk about it over the water cooler and things like this. And so, yeah, I suppose as my relationship to these things in real life changed, it shaped the course of the novel. And now it's actually very difficult to imagine the book without that timeline because it becomes so crucial, not even in the sense that, you know, like dramaturgically speaking, it sort of sets up mystery or suspense or intrigue, but it just works so well as a reflection of where I think we are as a society.”
2024-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · Cults, Communes and Female Rage on the Page, with Amy Twigg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The twenty eighteen timeline didn't actually come along until I think the final draft, well into the final, the third or final draft. I knew by then the story that I wanted to tell and I knew how it would end. But there had been just a feeling of unsatisfaction the whole way across writing it and I had never quite figured out why that was. And I guess just personally speaking, as I was writing the novel, the way that I started to think about true crime and events like this, how I had personally consumed content around similar events really made me start to question the ethics of true crime and sort of my participation in that. So it kind of then just felt very natural to write a timeline which has set a decade later and it sort of coming up to the anniversary of the”
2024-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · Cults, Communes and Female Rage on the Page, with Amy Twigg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“than what they secretly are. And so yeah, because of so much of the book deals with the idea of being next to an awful crime or witnessing a crime, specifically, you know, people consuming the idea of breach houses as a true crime product, like whether they hear it on the news or they watch a documentary about it. we can be complicit in violence by consuming it in I guess, unethical ways.”
2024-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · Cults, Communes and Female Rage on the Page, with Amy Twigg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My research sort of led me to, I guess, this theme of adjacency. So I was reading a lot of books about people who had been adjacent to some great crime or other. So one brilliant book which I had read, you know, when I was a teenager but then revisited was The Stranger Beside Me, which is written by a woman who worked with Ted Bundy in the suicide helpline center. And one thing that I found so interesting is that, you know, in the book, which is, you know, as far as we know, a real life account, if you needed to walk to your car, if you needed somebody to walk you to your car late at night, you would ask Ted and this idea of, you know, a person is not just one thing. There is good and there is bad and there are very bad people who are very good at making themselves look anything other.”
2024-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · Cults, Communes and Female Rage on the Page, with Amy Twigg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean it was several years of reading, mainly accounts from people who had escaped cults, which I found, you know, just devastating and also quite hopeful in many ways. I'd always been interested by the Manson family and I read a couple of biographies of Charles Manson because I just felt like his form of manipulation was so sinister and insidious to sort of prey on delinquent often like teenage girls who are, you know, so extremely vulnerable. So, you know, that was really the crux of the research. But as I sort of dug down further into the novel, especially when I was writing the future timeline, the 2018 timeline, which takes place 10 years after the events of Breach House.”
2024-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · Cults, Communes and Female Rage on the Page, with Amy Twigg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Physically dominating, you know, she's over six feet tall and she's very broad and I really wanted to, I guess, celebrate the idea of what a woman could be. I feel like we don't, specifically with cults, when we think of the women who joined them, we think of them as being like very fee, very, you know, narrow and small. I want us to play around this idea of a woman who could be so physically dominating. And just, yeah, so many of the women look up to her in that way and actually want a similar physique to her, you know, when they put on weight or they gain muscle, you know, these are things to be celebrated in the commune.”
2024-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · Cults, Communes and Female Rage on the Page, with Amy Twigg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sort of their right hand have been women. So these women have been highly intelligent people who are as capable of manipulating, if not more so, and are actually responsible for dealing with the financials of occult, you know, how they continue making money. And so I decided to quite literally cut out the middleman. I thought, well, it makes sense for this space to have this very powerful woman, you know, leading them. And Blythe is described as”
2024-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · Cults, Communes and Female Rage on the Page, with Amy Twigg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, one thing that I think people are always drawn to with occult narrative is the leader. They're always, you know, a character of charisma. They have to be charismatic for people to follow them and to listen to what they're saying, whatever agenda they're putting across, no matter how sensational that agenda might seem, they have to have enough presence for somebody to be able to follow that. You know, I had toyed with the idea of an all-female commune that was actually led by a male commune leader quite similar to the Manson family. Not that they were all women in the Manson family, but certainly the perpetrators of the crimes, a lot of them were young women. And so I had thought about that. But one thing that really interests me is that historically speaking, although many famous cult leaders have been male,”
2024-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · Cults, Communes and Female Rage on the Page, with Amy Twigg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Narratively speaking, I think you can't have the bad without the good. You have to have this moment of hope before, you know, whatever you do, whether you decide to crush that hope or, you know, turn it on its head. I think you do need to have this moment of hope. And certainly for me as a writer and as a person, I would love to believe that these safe spaces can exist. So I guess, yeah, a place of hope that these spaces can thrive in some way.”
2024-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · Cults, Communes and Female Rage on the Page, with Amy Twigg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are visionaries among cult leaders who may have seen an alternative way of living. And even if it was just for a moment, that might have been very earnest before the idea of a financial gain or whatever ends up being the crux of the reason why cults then end in quite violent ways. But I think that there is this definitely earnest moment for the commune where they think that they've all come from a place of trauma or come from a background that they have wanted to escape. And I think for all of the women, including the leader of the commune Blythe, I think there is a moment in the novel where they all believe that they can actually achieve what they want to. And I think, you know.”
2024-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · Cults, Communes and Female Rage on the Page, with Amy Twigg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think Breach House, you know, without spoiling anything, the The idea of this safe all-female space definitely began in earnest for the women of the novel. As I think actually, you know, a few different cults might have done. You know, I think there are”
2024-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · Cults, Communes and Female Rage on the Page, with Amy Twigg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess the idea of power and manipulation is obviously so rife with a cult when we think of cults, I think probably the most famous examples we can think of are the Manson Family or Jonestown. And while they center around really horrific crimes, which is probably the thing which sticks in the, I guess, our collective memory of this, it's a lot more sinister, even than what we're led to believe, this idea of manipulation and preying on people when they suffer a weak moment. You know, usually while people join cults after some great trauma, that isn't necessarily always the case. These are normal people. These are people like you and I, you or I who can, I guess, just be caught at quite a vulnerable moment and manipulated and the way that They're used to further occult leaders' agenda. It's incredibly horrific and I really wanted to”
2024-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · Cults, Communes and Female Rage on the Page, with Amy Twigg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, the story changed so much over the years. So I sort of had the germ of the idea in, I think, maybe 2017. And that was with the idea of a commune. I've always been really fascinated by the cult narrative. And I sort of, I knew as a writer that I wanted to explore this quite, I guess, constrained society. But the story changed so much over the years. It was only when I really started to sit down and write the first proper draft that it actually became an all-female commune. I thought for a while that maybe it would be mixed. But this idea of women in what is meant to be a safe female-only space really intrigued me.”
2024-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · Cults, Communes and Female Rage on the Page, with Amy Twigg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the novel follows a woman named Iris who I guess has come to a bit of crossroads at her life, or I suppose reach a bit of an impasse. She's just broken up with her boyfriend. She's back living with her mother and she's feeling quite directionless when she meets. A younger beguiling woman named Hazel who belongs to a women's commune, swiftly finds herself drawn into the life of this commune where the women live quite brashly, you know, they're sort of victims to their own whims and she experiences all sorts of Hidden desires and transgressions, and then things go slightly awry when a group of men arrive on the commune.”
2024-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · Cults, Communes and Female Rage on the Page, with Amy Twigg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT