“I can pass ?”
Sending that silly text shouldn’t have caused so much anxiety in me as I made my way to Matt’s house in West Los Angeles after a long day at the office.
But for a Muslim in her twenties, whose faith had encircled her life with norms, social and relational rules – notably that of avoiding the opposite sex before marriage – these three words fundamentally evoked betrayal, lust and sin, among others.
I hadn’t thought about what I was going to do when I was at his house. His tastefully furnished apartment revealed his penchant for order and meticulousness. His sofa had been custom-made by a cooperative of craftsmen in Venice. He continued to spout a few banalities about where he lived, to avoid – I suppose – the real conversation that was to follow.
A place “sure”
A few hours earlier, I was comfortably seated in one of the armchairs in the office, taking notes on my laptop. It was my first job in a writer’s roomwhere I worked on the series Framework. Broadcast on the American streaming platform Hulu, it tells the life of an American of the Muslim faith in search of meaning. If you don’t know anything about the way writing is conceived in television, imagine a giant group therapy bringing together the same handful of screenwriters every day for several weeks. We sit down and everyone recounts the events of their lives, in the hope that this casual discussion can bring out a nugget that can be used for entertainment purposes.
The basic idea is that in order to be able to write the most “authentic” stories possible, we must explore the depths of our personal experiences and traumas. The writer’s room is a “safe place”, most producers will tell you, no one is judging anyone. Except maybe me, who deemed my own experience unworthy of sharing, mainly because of my choice not to have sex or be in a relationship with anyone before marriage. Which meant that at 27 I was still a virgin.
I thought, however, that they would find this characteristic interesting enough – it was so unusual – to integrate it into the series by attributing it, for example, to one of the female characters. So I put the idea out of my mouth: “You could imagine that she’s trying her hand at masturbation for the first time, but she doesn’t know which side of the toothbrush to use.” It could be funny, in my eyes at least, but my proposal came up against general incomprehension.
“Who doesn’t know which side of a toothbrush to use?” finally launched one of the screenwriters in a burst of laughter.
“Moi !” I wanted to scream, but I remained silent, afraid I had already said too much. Also, like most of my pitches, this one was