Save this story Save Story Save this story How do you write a modern monster? Do you create a whimpering beast, as Guillermo del Toro did in his film adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein? Or a sexually repressed murderess, as Ryan Murphy did in Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story ?
In her Netflix adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden , Zoe Kazan takes on the challenge of reintroducing one of literature’s most infamous villains, Cathy Ames—who, among other things, killed her parents, abandoned her children, and shot her husband. Kazan does not sanitize her behavior, but her series (starring Florence Pugh as Ames) opens with a scene that appears several chapters deep in Steinbeck's novel; Cathy, bloodied and near the brink of death, crawls towards the Trask house in the middle of the night. The shift forces viewers familiar with the story to consider the character’s vulnerability. In spite of her manipulative and murderous schemes, she is human, and Kazan’s new framing of Steinbeck’s story gives her complexities room to breathe.
“I definitely don't think that anything that happened to Cathy as a person justifies the things that she does,” Kazan tells me on a recent Zoom call. “And I don't think it's as simple as ‘hurt people hurt people,’ you know? One of the ways I thought about her was like a shark that has to keep moving forward or she'll die. In that constant movement, it's like she's avoiding looking at herself.”
Zoe Kazan: I think this is like a tiny bit of a misunderstanding or a misnomer, just a little bit. I don't think that we're focusing more on Cathy than the book does. I think compared to the movie, we're focusing a lot more on Cathy. I think for me, it felt like this book is all about balances. Like it's all—to get really geeky—I think it's all dialectics. I think that there's a strange balancing act that the book is doing between philosophy and plot, and between good and evil, and I think that in the movie there was just an overbalancing into the masculine aspects and the boy's story, and Cathy, or Kate, was really relegated to being a side character. I think she has like 15 minutes of screen time or something. I think she's such a thorny and complicated character, and it just seemed to me like the obvious opportunity was to rebalance it and make it so it's not all about Cathy and it's not all from Cathy's POV. Maybe you disagree.
I totally agree. I mean, I think Steinbeck is, above all things, trying to be a humanist. And I think sometimes his mid-century white male identity or thought process overpowers his desire to be a humanist. And I think you see that in some of the ways that race is handled, and I think you see it in some of the ways that Cathy is handled. I think that there is some racism and misogyny in the text that goes against what he's trying to do, and so I think I was trying to honor Steinbeck's impulse in writing it and just clear away some of the things that would be distracting to a modern audience.
Well, I think a lot of the permission that I felt to do that came from having read the letters that he wrote to his editor when he was writing East of Eden . Have you ever read those?
Oh wow, amazing! Well, they were published as a completely separate book. I think it's called Journal of a Novel: Letters from Eden . You can't map it completely. You can't read them in tandem [with East of Eden ], because he did a massive rewrite of the book after his first draft, so it's not a one-to-one, but you can read a lot of his original impulse and desire and what he was thinking about as he was writing.
When he first talks about Cathy in the letters, he says, "I'm going to write a monster unlike any you've ever seen. And as he writes, it starts to become more complicated for him. He starts to say things like, "We all have a little monster blood in us, and people will feel compelled by her not because she is foreign, but because she is familiar.” And he says, “Maybe I am a monster too.” I had weirdly read the journals before, because I was just so compelled by this book for so long. But I went back through really with a fine-tooth comb as I was preparing to adapt this. When I read that, I thought, "Oh, I can take some of this stuff that's in the mouth of the narrator and put it in her mouth.” Because—and again, this is me getting really nerdy here—but I think, in a weird way, Steinbeck has bifurcated himself into two, into Adam and Cathy. I think there's a kind of bipolar quality to Steinbeck himself. You can read in the journals, the sort of really high highs and really low lows. There's a lot of kindness in him, and a lot of love and a lot of destructive impulse as well.
I had read also these two biographies of Steinbeck before I started writing, and I really felt like he's drawing a portrait of himself, and half of himself is in Cathy. And it's more disavowed, maybe. This warning that she's a monster is a way of disavowing that this is a person that you need to have identification with.
But when we get later in the book to when Kate and Adam re-meet—in what is episode five in our series—she says, “Everything in the world is evil.” Everyone is evil or stupid, basically. And I thought, Oh, this is a lot like Adam's POV, but opposite . Like Adam's viewpoint is that the world is good, even when he thinks about his father. His father has some unsavory qualities, and it takes him basically the whole book to acknowledge that, even though he didn't like his father very much. And I think that I was really curious about, if I put those words in her mouth, does it allow an audience to forgo some of that distance between themselves and the evil person? One of the things that I said over and over again to our heads of department was we don't learn anything if she's a psychopath. We only learn something about ourselves if we consider her to be a human. And she might be a really different person than you or me. But I think it goes along with that humanist impulse to be like, why are we wired this way? And I even think that stuff about being a monster is a way of thinking about why some humans are born different from others.
I find Cathy fascinating. And I think for me, both as an actor and as a writer, my main entry point is curiosity, more than love or judgment or something like that. I have to get really curious about these characters. And Cathy was very easy to be curious about. Like, why does she do the things she does, and why does she say the things she does? And almost looking at it in a forensic way. One of the things I noticed was she didn't lie a lot. She actually tells the truth most of the time. She just omits things. She says straight out to Adam, “I'm not gonna stay.” And I found it so curious that she is a person that is so private and so hidden and so deceptive, but that she's incredibly honest at the same time.
When she sees Aron—who she thinks looks so much like her, and reminds her of her younger self—that is the thing that ultimately breaks her. I thought, “I wonder if there's just a part of herself that she has not been able to acknowledge, or that there's a way that she has not been able to look at herself. And I folded it into the writing by giving her a lot of moments in reflection, like where she's looking in a mirror or she's looking in her reflection in a window. And I think that—I don't want to give anything away for a reader—but later in the series, I've sort of extrapolated out from that to have her talk to herself, and but she's in a way that she thinks she's not talking to herself. There's this kind of avoidance of self or self-reflection that allows her to do the things that she does. One of the things I admire about her is that she demands that she be in control of her life. And she finds ways to do that, even in situations that seem impossible for her to get out of.
I will say that when I was writing her, I found myself incredibly irritable in my life.
You know, it's like one of these things—I'm sure you have this sometimes—when you're reading a novel, and then you see the world as if it's in that novel. Everything seems like it's part of that thing. I think playing a character or writing a character can be a little bit like that, where you don't really realize until after you finish. Like, oh, I've been really influenced by what I've been writing. Like, I would be working on an episode that was particularly about her, I would be so annoyed with my partner, and I'd be so irritable. And I'm not really a super angry person. My anger would be really prominent compared to my normal life. Then I would stop working on that and be like, “Oh my god, she's so angry.” I wouldn't even realize until after the fact.
I kind of joke sometimes, like if she lived in this time, she'd be Jeff Bezos or something.
She might find a more lawful outlet for it. Maybe, who knows?
[ laughing ] We’re on the same page. Maybe she would, maybe she wouldn’t. But I’m like, Cathy, you would have loved being a billionaire .
Yeah. Listen, there are things in the book that I find incredibly misogynist, and I accept it because, what else are you going to do? Every piece of art is a product of its time. Every artist is a product of their time. I do think, like I said, that his impulse is to be a humanist. I think he's much more focused on the boys in general than the girls. I do think he's very curious about Cathy, and that she sort of takes over the book in this funny way. And I think she's really the engine of the book at a plot level.
The little glimpses that we get of these women feel very specific and very real. Like the thing about Adam’s mother feels to me like we just don’t have the full picture there.
I totally agree. It's almost like there's a door frame, and there's something just beyond the door. And what I'm catching a glimpse of is really specific and interesting. Yeah, but I just can't see any more past that door frame.
When Abra says, “He [Aron] made up a person and he put my skin on her”—I feel like many young women have had that feeling about a young man. There's some really specific things that I feel like, “God, how do you know that? Who did you talk to?” One person that I have so much curiosity about in the book is Dessie Hamilton. And it breaks my heart that, within seven episodes, there just wasn't enough room to do justice to the Hamilton story and also the Trask family story. Like I think if I had had twice as many episodes or three more episodes or something, I could have done something there, but I love Tom Hamilton and I love Dessie Hamilton. They’re two of my favorite characters. I have this real suspicion that Dessie Hamilton was gay.
Yes I do. I think there’s a lot of textual evidence for it.
Well, I wondered, because [Steinbeck’s] remembering things from his childhood, and I don’t even know that he fully understands what the context is. He says she had this dress shop and the sounds of women's laughter coming out of it, and that women would go in just to hang out, and then it says someone broke her heart, and they could never figure out who it was. There never seemed to have been a man. And then she was never the same after her heart was broken. And I was like, well, this woman is gay. Sorry you can't see that, John Steinbeck.
I would love a movie about Desi Hamilton with her little gay dress shop and like what happens behind those walls. And you know, Tom Hamilton was so important to Steinbeck. He named his son after him. I don't know. I love the Hamiltons, and I love Dessie.
I think it's a fair criticism. I am not a Steinbeck completist. I've read probably six of his novels or something and Travels with Charley .
I love it so much. It was actually one of the first Steinbecks I read. But when I read Grapes of Wrath , those women seem very fully fledged to me.
My original impulse was to start with Adam's mother's suicide, which I had a really great scene for. We had to cut a bunch for budget. I had a lot more originally of Lee in San Francisco. Basically, any locations that we were only going to use once were incredibly expensive. If I could pull anything from the book, if I had a lot more space, I'd want more of the Hamiltons.
I had a poetry teacher in college, this guy J.D. McClatchy, who I loved. He talked a lot about how helpful limitations are creatively. And for me, having to pare down eight episodes to seven, all of the cuts and changes I had to make for budget became like an incredible opportunity for me, because I had to really think about, how can I say the same amount with less? How can I prioritize what's really important here? What do I need thematically? How can I make two scenes into one and make that one scene do the same thing. I think it made me have to make a lot of the hard decisions before we ever got into the editing room, and that was better for the series.
So originally, I wanted to do a Lee bottle episode, like a completely invented story [about] Lee in San Francisco. And I thought I want to hire somebody who's Asian American to come help me imagine this and do this with me. I had read Edinburgh , [Chee’s] novel, and I thought that there was a loneliness to that character that really reminded me of Lee, and a privacy to that character and to the writing. And I think Lee's privacy seemed really interesting to me. I just had a feeling that this is the right person, even though he had never written a script before. Or he had, but never anything that had been made.
Weirdly, I think, I wanted a novelist's imagination on this. So I told him about what I imagined for the story, and we had a lot of back-and-forth conversation. He wrote a treatment, and then I sort of expanded on it, and then he wrote a draft of that episode, and then we got shut down for the writers’ strike. And when we came back from that time, it became clear that at a budgetary level, we didn't have the budget for eight episodes. I mean, Netflix was incredibly generous, we had so many resources, but the reality is that we needed to put every bit of our money on screen and really think about how we did that. There were a lot of one-off locations in that episode that we just couldn't afford. I had to really think about what is useful here and what is necessary.
One thing that was really important to me as I worked with him, but also when I was doing my thinking on my own about that, was that if we're going to flesh out Lee's storyline a little bit more, I want his story to have the same themes that the rest of the book has. Like, it needs to be a fold in and not a tangent. Otherwise, it doesn’t earn its space. And I think that we found this thing that I feel really proud of. We had a consultant on set who translated the stuff that I wrote and that Alexander wrote into Cantonese for us. Anyways, this is all to say, there's of course some part of me that wishes that we could have had all of those locations and all of those scenes, but I feel really proud of what we did, and I hope other people feel that way when they see it.
I agree, and I have to say, I think it's one of the reasons to adapt this again, to give some more life to Lee. And I don't mean that as a correction to the text, really, but to honor the spirit of the text and carry it further than they did or could or wanted to in the 1950s.
That part is from the book. But the observation about, “You sound like you were someone else’s imaginary wife”—that was a line that Alexander Chee came up with that I thought was so brilliant and so good. I think that it's a very complicated and interesting, as you say, unconventional, but also mysterious arrangement.
It was very important to me to not put into dialogue the politics of our time or identity conceptions of our time. I really felt like I needed to honor the experiences that Lee and Cathy, in particular, have of being a woman or being Asian American in this time. Like, I can't do something to betray this. But I do think I tried to hold the object up to the light and be like, "Look at this.” Yeah, it's got some interesting angles on it.
You know what's interesting is that Steinbeck has all of these pairs, right? Adam and Charles, and Adam and Cathy, and Aron and Cal. I really thought of Cathy and Adam as being, in a Jungian sense, like a yin and yang. I thought Cathy is actually like the Jungian masculine, and Adam is the Jungian feminine, because Cathy is all action and forward movement, and Adam is all stasis and perfection and not moving forward on purpose. And so I think I was always contending with that. I really didn't think as much about Lee being like a counterpoint to Cathy. I think it's totally fair. It wasn't 100% on my mind.
What was on my mind was Lee as this interruptive power within this family. There have been these cycles on both sides of this family, with Cathy and Adam. Lee is this force for change. I thought a lot about the choices that he's making in raising these boys, and then when he comes back, I think his status in the household changes. To the outside, maybe it’s the same. But within the household, their arrangement changes. He really steps in as mother, or as a co-head of this household. Whereas before, I think he was literally all things to both children, because I think Adam wasn't present as a father. But also, it wasn't recognized at all that he was doing any of the things that he was doing. And I think when that change happens, he is consciously trying to break some of these chains and cycles, these familial patterns. I was really curious about that, partially because that is a thing I think so much about as a parent.
I started writing this when my older child was a year and a half, and I really felt a lot of identification with Lee. I think I also felt the pull of like Cathy, of being like, “There's something so clear about her selfishness.” And as a young parent, there's so little room for selfishness. I think I felt this feeling of between the duty and honor and care and thoughtfulness of Lee and the rabid self-interest of Cathy. I felt inside me were two wolves, and they were them.
I think when I first read the book, I was really taken with Cathy and curious about her, and like I said, this quality of her selfishness was so unlike most female characters I had ever read. I mean, she's a very singular character, and also I was such a good girl. And I've always been very caretaking and people-pleasing, and it's always really mattered to me to be a good person. And I think I felt something primal and different come out of me reading it, feeling like, "Wow!” She's a very powerful person, and I felt attracted to that power. I don't know how many times I re-read it before I started working on it. I do think it grows with you.
By the time I came back to it as a complete adult in my 30s, starting to adapt this, I felt, like I said, a lot more identification with Lee. But even as a teen I was very drawn by the intergenerational aspect of the novel. But I think it hits you different as a parent than it does as a child, right? I think as a younger person, I probably identified more with Cal and Aron.
The joy of adapting it, you know, every time I would get to a new episode, I would re-read the book up to that point. So I re-read this book eight times in pieces while adapting it, and then of course came back to it so many times over the six years of re-writing. So it's probably the book I know best at this point. The thing that is shocking to me about it is that there's still things that surprise me in it. Just picking up the book, it's just so full of treasure. The little introduction that he puts at the front of it, where he writes to his editor and he says, "I've made a box and I've put everything I have in it, and it's still not full.”
That's how I feel about it, and it's how I feel as a reader with it. I bring myself to it at all these different ages, and something new strikes me about it. I do think that this idea that we are all choosing all the time how we want to be and who we want to be and what we want to bring forward, I think that that is an important thing to think about at any age. I think that the book has a kind of insistence that we should not ignore the past. That we cannot. That it will come back and bite us if we do, and that we should not walk around burdened by rumination on the past either. And I think that's a very tricky line to walk, but I think it speaks exactly to the political moment that we're in. That only became more true as I worked on it over these six years.
No, I feel it so much. I almost feel it now more than I did before. I spent so much time with this book. I think I would expect that after spending so much time with this book that it would stop being mysterious to me, and so it's even more mysterious to me. It has continued to be surprising and arresting and profound. I would love it if I could come back to this book and be surprised by it in 20 years, you know? I think sometimes it's really hard for me to revisit things that I've worked on because, in a way, they die to you, as a person who's making them, once they're out in the world. I don't think I've ever re-watched one of the movies I've written. I don't re-read the plays I've written once they're published. But I would love to be able to come back to this book as a person in my 60s and see something I didn't see before
Maybe, or maybe I’ll be like, “Ugh, these people are impossible.” Who knows? Anything is possible at that age.
You know, I don't know. I think for better or worse, a lot of the decisions I've made in my life have been just gut instinct things. Very early in the editing process on East of Eden , my agents texted, being like, "Do you want to pitch on Lonesome Dove ? Like, I bet you don't, considering where you are in your life right now,” and I was like, "No, actually, I do,” and texted Jeb, being like, ‘We're pitching on this.’” I had an instinct. I think it's funny, this is curious to me, I share your curiosity, and I don't think I have an answer yet. I will say, like most westerns, or most great westerns, I think Lonesome Dove is really about mortality and the question of facing death. And I think most of the work that I am most interested in doing is also about what makes life worth living in the face of our certain mortality. I think that I’m always trying to answer that question for myself.
I am so compelled by the characters in Lonesome Dove . I love them so much, and they seem like really real people to me, in the same way that the people in this felt very real to me, and I have curiosity about them. It feels like the book is kind of infinite in the same way that this feels infinite to me. I will be infinitely curious about it. But I agree that if you were gonna type me, I don't think you'd be like, “Okay, that person is going to become obsessed with the American West.” But yeah, I don't know. I think there's something. Maybe I'll know when I'm finished with it.
Well, there are multiple Lonesome Dove world books.
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