It’s one of the few unfortunate features of the gig. But as your newsletter writer, I am deeply familiar with the words that have come out of Donald Trump’s mouth over the past decade. What has this done to my brain? I imagine video clips, by turns incoherent, bigoted, and dumb, folding onto one another within my skull, creating a kind of hallucinatory effect.
I do my best to quiet that noise—a girl’s got to live, I tell myself—but one recent Trump remark plagues me: Tough it out. It was our president’s advice to pregnant women in pain. That instead of taking safe measures to relieve suffering, they suck it up.
It infuriated me.
It was against this fury that I had the chance to speak with Mary Bronstein recently about her new film, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. It stars an incredible Rose Byrne in what many are calling a career-best performance as a working mother drowning in increasing levels of crisis. Someone called it Uncut Gems for moms. I agree, but it’s also so much more. As I wrote here, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You arrives as a shot-out-of-a-cannon rejoinder, a giant middle finger to the notion that a woman “tough it out.” My conversation with Bronstein, the film’s writer and director, is something that will stay with me for a long time.
The film is out today, and I hope you take the time to read.
—Inae Oh
