From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment, the Home Edition. I'm Elvis Mitchell. I knew my guest, Amy Cobbman, back when she was just a novelist. She's now a filmmaker.

She's adopted her novel, a monthful of air for the screen, and she's also directed it. Let me bow down,

Amy, and say, thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. There's so much to talk to you about. I mean, in some ways, with this story, I felt, and I was kind of watching, like, the real world version of Rosemary's Baby,

because your poor protagonist is surrounded by all these men

who think they're giving her the right advice,

but she's not really being heard or paid attention in the right way,

and she's looking for honesty.

Seeing that played out reminded me of that

section early in the book where your protagonist, Julie, is on the elevator with Philip Roth,

and she's aware of the way he's judging him. And then she kind of writes her own scenario. And I kind of

thought what you did with having men throughout the book is kind of an echo of that.

Knowing that I was going to be on this podcast, I kept thinking, oh, my goodness, what's this

thesis going to be? What's this thesis going to be? And I realized like 15 minutes ago, there's

no way I could figure out the thesis. Yeah, you brought up something. I watched Rosemary's

baby before doing this book. And I thought a lot about, you know,

what he was saying in that and how she's viewed as a woman. And I do have a lot of male

protagonists telling Julie what to do. When I was writing that book, I was thinking a lot about,

you know, shame and how much shame women carry, you know,

real shame and, you know, their perceived shame that things they feel guilty about, that they're

not even responsible for what we allow for ourselves within the confines of that shame. And so much

of that, at least so much of that in my life was defined by men and what you were supposed to be for them and what your responsibility toward them was.

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