Thinking About Writing About The Handmaid’s Tale

My mum and I get compared to the Gilmore Girls all the fucking time. I resisted watching the series for a long time, shrugging off the comparison while adopting my natural state of sardonic and opinionated. But then I had to watch it in order to have an opinion, to see whether we were actually the Gilmore Girls. We’re not. We drink tea and say fuck a lot…

But I’m not here to talk about Gilmore Girls… I’m here to talk about how my mum, my best and closest friend, threw me under the bus (not the first time, and it won’t be the last). It all began because I needed to talk to my mum about Big Little Lies so I made her watch it. Being her daughter’s mother my mum binge watched the show in record time (I’m so fucking proud) hence it took no time at all for us to be in the position where we could go “full media bitches” on it. What I didn’t account for was the fact that my mum is a professional and immediately started watching another series immediately after… I was unaware of this.

After going critical media theory on Big Little Lies for the best part of an hour my mother dropped the bombshell.

‘Jaqui I can’t talk to you until you’ve watched The Handmaid’s Tale’.

The gauntlet had been set. My mother knows that bowing out of communication is a sure fire way to get me to do anything. It was an asshole move, but effective. Ask me how long I can go without talking to my mum?

As I hung up I asked Monkey if we had any plans. He told me that owing to our financials the plan was to eat leftovers and use as little of everything that wasn’t free as possible. Score. I turned to Showmax and settled in. Ten hours later I’d gone through my allocated weekly 500ml allowance of wine (fucking diets are such a buzz kill) and I felt like my brain was going to explode. There’s a line from an episode of Grey’s Anatomy where Meredith Grey says,

‘That’s called thinking. Go with it’.

Not to sound like an intellectual asshole but not all thinking is created equal. If you’re not completely fucked up, torn to shreds, dehydrated, fucked up, emotionally spent and riddled with headache it’s not legit thinking. Thinking doesn’t nap… it hangs around… it lingers… It engulfs you and you just can’t shake it… The only way to put it to bed is to write it down… which is why I’m here. I’m a prisoner in my own thoughts… it’s time to escape. But I’m not sure I want to.

So now I’m at the stage called thinking… Still…