“Nothing about pregnancy is not violent,” says Amber Tamblyn. “Nothing. From the minute you find out and you’re puking everywhere, to the thoughts that run through your head about the things you imagine doing if someone harmed your child.” Pregnancy, she adds, can make you feral.
In a sun-drenched restaurant in Brooklyn, we are discussing the 35-year-old’s debut novel, Any Man. It is a dark piece of experimental fiction about a female serial rapist. Tamblyn, a poet, activist and actor (she starred in the films The Ring and The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants and as the title character in the TV series Joan of Arcadia), wrote the bulk of the novel while pregnant with her first child. Some of the book’s darkness, she says, is a product of this, borne from a “shadow part” of herself that she experienced for the first time while pregnant. Part of [the book’s] brutality came from “carrying a woman inside of me, in 2016, during that particular election year”.
Released last week, Any Man has already caused a stir; Tamblyn’s decision to make the rapist a woman and to write from the point of view of the rapist’s six male victims has upset some people.
“I think they see it as I’m just reversing the gender roles,” she says, “and I’m [taking] away the experience of women and giving it to men. That’s OK. They can feel that way.”
However, Tamblyn stresses, “this is not about reversing gender roles”. It’s about having “more difficult conversations about what sexual assault looks like. I mean, one of the greatest gripes about the #MeToo movement was that it was not inclusive,” that it focused too much on privileged, white women.
Any Man’s focus was, in part, a rallying cry to pay more attention to male victims. More than that, however, Tamblyn wanted to provoke people into paying more attention to rape culture in general. “This was very much about resensitising a conversation and finding a way to talk about sexual assaults in a way that didn’t make everyone yawn.”
You can’t talk about a new novel that deals with sexual assault without looking at it through the lens of #MeToo, particularly when the author made waves last year after accusing Oscar-nominated actor James Woods of preying on her when she was 16 (Woods denies the allegations). Tamblyn is also one of the founders of Time’s Up, an organisation launched at the beginning of this year to fight sexual harassment in the film industry.
However, Tamblyn’s decision to make her antagonist a woman did not start with an intention to expand the conversation around sexual assault.
When she first started toying with writing a novel four years ago, long before Harvey Weinstein was exposed, she began with the observation that it is rare to see a truly awful female antagonist. Someone who is “doing things without consequence and for no other reason than she just enjoyed them. For so many movies and books, if there is a female antagonist, they’re usually doing something to get back at someone. There has to be a redeemable quality, no matter how small. Even if it’s their prettiness.”
The shadowy figure at the centre of Any Man, Maude, doesn’t have any redeeming features. No tragic past or attractive face; she doesn’t conform to the “rules” for women. You could say Tamblyn set out to break down the boundaries society has placed around Every Woman. Maude is not meant to be a believable, three-dimensional character but, rather, “a sort of projection of all of society’s dehumanising of women”.
Writing Any Man was cathartic. While Tamblyn says she has never been sexually assaulted “in any of the ways” in the book, she knows what it is like to be a victim of sexual violence. She has spoken openly, for example, about an ex-boyfriend who assaulted her at a nightclub in Hollywood, dragging her out of the venue “by my private parts”.
Rape culture and gender inequality is not about men versus women, Tamblyn says. We all need to empathise more and interrogate our own complicity. “I think liberals do that. In this country, they do it too much, to the point where it harms them. And conservatives don’t do it at all. To the point where it harms them.”
It would be hard to talk about complicity without mentioning Tamblyn’s husband, the comedian David Cross, who plays Tobias Funke in the sitcom Arrested Development. In May, a New York Times interview with the cast of Arrested Development was held up as a disturbing demonstration of how complicity works. When the interviewer brought up accusations of sexual misconduct (which he denies) and harassment against the cast member Jeffrey Tambor, Jessica Walter (who plays Lucille Bluth) spoke tearfully about how Tambor had yelled at her on set. The male actors, including Cross, quickly rallied to Tambor’s defence, talking over Walter and minimising her experience.
“I have thoughts [on that], but they will stay with me,” Tamblyn says. But, she says, “you better believe that those type of actions are not going without some pretty intense, private conversations. There are many men that are like that. They just don’t understand what they did wrong until they’ve done it and then someone shows them.”
And, again, she says, that is really the point of Any Man: to show, not tell. To show the violence of objectification; the physical and psychological violence of assault; the violence of not being believed.
“To find a way to get people who have been blind their whole lives to see. That is the work. That is the only way that things can change.”
