Writer Mother Monster: Daria Polatin, “There’s only so much pie, you know?”

“There’s only so much pie, you know?”
Daria Polatin is a playwright, TV writer-producer and author who is developing a TV limited series based on her novel Devil in Ohio for Netflix. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and 11-week-old son and describes writer-motherhood in 3 words as: “stunning, shifting, softening.” In this episode, Daria talks about what it’s like to maintain a fast-paced career in television with a newborn at home…in a pandemic. And, find out why she didn’t tell her colleagues she was pregnant until the last second.

Writer Mother Monster is an interview series devoted to dismantling the myth of having it all and offering writer-moms solidarity, support, and advice.

Transcript

Writer Mother Monster

Monday, December 7 @ 6 PM (EST)
Daria Polatin

Daria Polatin is an award-winning playwright, TV writer-producer, and author who is currently developing a TV limited series based on her novel Devil in Ohio for Netflix. She was a co-executive producer on J.J. Abrams’ Castle Rock for Hulu, where her episode “The Laughing Place” was named one of Entertainment Weekly’s Best TV Episodes of 2019, and she has been a co-executive producer on Hunters (Amazon), and writer-producer on two seasons of Jack Ryan (Amazon), Condor (MGM/Direct TV), Heels (Starz) and Shut Eye (Hulu). As a playwright, Daria’s play Palmyra will be presented at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Los Angeles, and her work has been produced at The Kennedy Center, in New York, London and Hong Kong. Born of Egyptian descent, Daria received her MFA from Columbia University and is a founding member of The Kilroys, the advocacy group for gender equality in the American theater. She has one son who is 11 weeks old, and she describes writer motherhood in three words as “stunning, shifting, suffering.”

Lara 

Hello, and welcome to Writer Mother Monster. I’m Lara Ehrlich, your host, and our guest tonight is Daria Polatin. Before I introduce Daria, I want to thank you all for tuning in and let you know that you can now listen to Writer Mother Monster as a podcast on all major audio platforms, or read the interview transcripts at your leisure on writermothermonster.com. If you enjoyed the episode, please consider becoming a Writer Mother Monster patron or patroness on Patreon. Your support helps make this series possible. Please also chat with us during the interview. Your comments and questions will appear in our broadcast studio, and we’ll weave them into our conversation. 

Now, I’m excited to introduce Daria. Daria is an award-winning playwright, TV writer-producer, and author. She is currently developing a TV limited series based on her novel Devil in Ohio for Netflix. She was a co-executive producer on J.J. Abrams’ Castle Rock for Hulu, where her episode “The Laughing Place” was named one of Entertainment Weekly’s Best TV Episodes of 2019. She has been a co-executive producer on Hunters (Amazon), and writer-producer on two seasons of Jack Ryan (Amazon), Condor (MGM/Direct TV), Heels (Starz) and Shut Eye (Hulu). As a playwright, Daria’s play Palmyra will be presented at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Los Angeles, and her work has been produced at The Kennedy Center, in New York, London and Hong Kong. Born of Egyptian descent, Daria received her MFA from Columbia University and is a founding member of The Kilroys, the advocacy group for gender equality in the American theater. She has one son who is 11 weeks old, so she’s right in the thick of it, and she describes writer motherhood in three words as “stunning, shifting, suffering.” 

Daria Polatin  

Well, thank you for having me. I’m very happy to be here.

Lara Ehrlich  

Oh, I’m happy to have you. It’s great to meet in person, as well. I’m just gonna jump right in by asking you how you’re doing with a newborn in the midst of a pandemic, with all of the things you’re working on.

Daria Polatin  

It is a lot, but it is wonderful. It is a life full on. And of course, you know, everything always happens all at once. I’m really enjoying my son. He’s just so delightful. And it puts everything in perspective, because everything is new. Every day is new, every movement that he does is new, and he makes new sounds, and it’s just really refreshing. And in contrast to what’s going on in the world.

Lara Ehrlich 

My daughter’s 4, so I’m trying to remember back to what 11 weeks was like. Is he rolling over right now?

Daria Polatin  

Yeah, he is. He tosses his hips to the side and flips his body over, and when I try to roll him and do tummy time, he bucks back, like, “I’m not gonna do tummy time right now.”

Lara Ehrlich

He’s getting willful. What was it like being pregnant during a pandemic?

Daria Polatin   

Very isolating. I found out I was pregnant on New Year’s morning. My husband and I got married last fall, and we were on our honeymoon and came back in January. I was working on the show Hunters—the Amazon show about Nazi hunters with Al Pacino—for the beginning of my pregnancy when I would go get nauseous and take naps in my car in the parking lot, because I was so tired and I didn’t want anyone to know. I bought all these baggy clothes so that nobody would see my burgeoning belly. 

And then it was very interesting, because that writers’ room was in person to start, and then we moved in March to a virtual writers’ room, and from then on, all the in-person meetings and writing just went virtual. So, nobody knew I was pregnant. I wasn’t planning on shouting it from the rooftops anyway because of bias, conscious or unconscious. By the end of the pregnancy, I was really big, and I would just frame myself out of the picture for my meetings. 

But yeah, it’s very isolating. Because the baby’s so young, I still barely go out. I walk around my neighborhood, wearing a mask, and my husband gets groceries, and that’s about it. We just don’t want to risk the exposure. There are so many unknowns with the disease still. And so just to be on the safe side, we’re super careful. I mean, the most exposed we were was in the hospital for four days, when you have tons of people coming in and out. Of course, they’re all wearing masks, and they’re all very careful and very respectful. So, it’s pretty isolating, although it’s kind of nice to not have to go anywhere. 

I have no FOMO. I’m not like, “Oh, no, I’m missing this party or this this event because I’m home with the baby.” Most people are home, so in that way, it’s nice to not have to go anywhere and just really get to spend this time with my son because it goes so quickly. Already, I look at pictures of him from a few weeks ago, and I’m like, “Oh, he was so little!” The time flies.

Lara Ehrlich  

Yeah, people tell you that time flies, and it’s hard to quite understand what that means until you become a mother. That’s something you said you want to talk about: How the concept and accessibility of time has changed in light of having a child. Tell me more.

Daria Polatin  

Time is really punctuated when you have a child; particularly a baby. I used to have a certain sensibility of my time and my day and what I could get done, and now the time periods I have are much shorter. I have worked very quickly, working in TV, but having to code switch really is tricky. A few minutes of feeding can feel like hours, and the nap feels like one second. Time just has all these new nuances, even though it is a constant.

Lara Ehrlich  

I’d love to hear more about the differences between writing for TV and for theater, and you’ve written a novel, and now you’re adapting the novel for TV, which must be a whole different ball of wax. So, I’m wondering where to start, because you’ve done so much. Let’s go back to the beginning. Did you want to work in TV? Did you want to work in theater? Did you want to write novels? All of the above?

Daria Polatin  

Well, when I was really little, I wrote short stories. I mean, I started a lot of novels, but they ended up being short shorts. I started in that format, but I got into theater when I was in high school. I went to public school, but it had an amazing drama program, and in that, there was a lot of student-directed and student-written projects. I started writing plays in high school. 

Then I went to Boston University for undergrad, and I was in the theater department there, and I studied acting and theater. I was actually majoring in acting. And one day, I was walking down the hallway, and one of the teachers came up to me and he said, “You are a writer, and you need to take my playwriting class.” And I was like, “Oh, I’m busy. I have my acting class.” And he’s like, “No, you need to take my class.” I took the class, but I was really busy. I tried to drop the class, and he’s like, “I’m not signing your form. Not training you would be like not training a ballerina, and you need to finish your play. That’s all—finish the play. That’s all you need to do for the class.” 

So, I adapted a short story by Chekhov, as he wrote these beautiful, emotional short stories, and I loved him as a playwright as well. He was one of the first playwrights to write dramedy, and I was very drawn to him. So, I wrote this play for this class, and it ended up being produced for the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival, and it won this contest, and it got published, and the play got produced at the Kennedy Center in D.C. I moved to New York and kind of landed, at 21, 22, with a published play and this clear door open for me, all because this teacher made me write this play. 

I kept writing plays in New York. I was in a wonderful group called Youngblood, a group of emerging playwrights under 30, and we would write and produce plays. I had a couple of productions there. I ended up going to grad school at Columbia, and there, I also studied and really focused on playwriting. As I was finishing up at Columbia, I sold a play to a network and developed that into a pilot, so I kind of dipped my toe into television, and that was also around the same time that TV was opening up and it wasn’t just Law and Order and Friends, you know? There was more nuanced character work—not that half-hour sitcoms aren’t very, very difficult; the writers make it look easy, but those are very hard to write—but watching Weeds and Sopranos and Nurse Jackie… those kinds of stories and characters interested me. 

I moved out to L.A. and started working my way up in TV. My entrance into TV corresponded with the first show I stepped on, Shut Eye, which was on Hulu, about a fake psychic with real visions—which was fabulous and really fun to work on. At that point, there were maybe 200 shows on the air, and now there are over 500 scripted shows on the air, so the medium has just exploded. I feel like my timing was really, really lucky.

Lara Ehrlich  

Well, a lot of hard work went into that, too. Don’t sell yourself short.

Daria Polatin  

I still write plays, not super often. I did a program with the Center Theatre Group out here in L.A., and I developed my play Palmyra with them. And I’m writing a short play for a benefit festival in the spring. But I mostly focus on TV now.

Lara Ehrlich  

I definitely want to get to the translation of your novel to a TV show. But first, let’s backtrack a little bit to the timing issue. Talk me through your drafting process and whether you write faster for TV and how that process changed when you wrote a novel. Did you have to slow down? Were you able to keep your pace up? What was that process like?

Daria Polatin  

Good question. I can get into it in a minute, but TV has very different parts of the process. There’s the pitching, and you have to write a pitch and you have to write basically a sales monologue—so that’s one type of writing. Then there’s outlining for an episode, and that’s a 15-page document where you are telling the story of each scene in an episode or for the whole arc, like an outline for an episode. And then you write the script, which is the fun part. And if you’ve done all the work building up to it, then the script is really fun, because you’re writing dialogue. 

I can do them all quickly now, because I’ve been doing it for a long time, but they’re all different levels of arduousness. Writing a pitch is very tricky. Every word of a script is finely crafted as well, but that’s the most fun part for me, writing the script, reading the scenes. Writing outlines is tough. I know a lot of writers outline their projects in different mediums, and it’s just not the most fun to do an outline, but it’s the scaffolding for the cathedral that you’re gonna make. 

As far as fiction, when I graduated from Columbia, I graduated with a degree in playwriting, and I was like, “Okay, now what?” I ended up getting a job ghostwriting for Alloy Entertainment, and I ghost wrote two novels for one of their New York Times bestselling middle-grade series. Those were under very tight timelines and also a fixed amount of pay. So the faster I wrote those, the more I was getting paid. I taught myself not to belabor that work. And plus, it was a first draft for the author of the series, who was going to rewrite it. 

Then, when I wrote Devil in Ohio, I actually wrote the first 100 pages—part one of the book—and I wrote an outline of the rest of the book, and we sold it off of that. I wasn’t working a lot in TV at the time, and then, of course, as soon as I sold it, I got very, very busy. I got my first big job, and I was like, “Okay, I’ll write it when I’m done with this show.” And then I got my second big job, my dream job, working on Jack Ryan with Carlton Cuse, who did Lost, which is one of my favorite shows. So I ended up writing the rest of the book at like, five in the morning and at midnight and on my lunch breaks, and it was very, very difficult. I was just like, gotta get to my deadline.

Lara Ehrlich  

Are you on maternity leave, or did you get maternity leave? Have you been working and caring for a newborn in the midst of the pandemic? What have the last 11 weeks looked like for you?

Daria Polatin  

I took maternity leave, but I’m in the middle of a couple projects. I started back on one of them about three weeks in, just an hour or two a day. I would say there was maybe three weeks, but even then, my reps were like, “Hey, we don’t want to bother you, but, you know, we need to get back to these people about this deal and what do you think,” so they were very respectful of my time, but I put an away message on my email, which was good. Now I’m working as full capacity as I can. My husband’s mother has been here for the last month, helping us with the baby, which has been amazing and has definitely given me a lot more time. But I’m still feeding. We do some bottles, but I have little chunks of time, essentially.

Lara Ehrlich  

Have you noticed your brain working differently, now that you have your newborn with you?

Daria Polatin  

Because of the amount that I need to get done, I need to work quickly, and I guess it’s a good lesson in not second-guessing myself as much. I need to just make decisions and move on, where, in the past, I may have really gone over something—read it over and over and over and improved it one more time. I don’t have time to do that now. Also, I’ve been doing it for a very long time, so for me, it’s kind of about trusting the process and trusting that I’ve been doing this for many years, trusting my intuition, my first draft. I don’t want to say that I’m shortchanging the process, but I can move through the process much quicker now. And I have to; otherwise, I can’t keep up, or I would have to take on less, either as a writer as a mother, and I don’t want to do that. I want it all.

Lara Ehrlich  

That leads us to a great place, where I want to ask you about what has been challenging about wanting it all, because you have such a successful career, and now you have a small child. It sounds as though you’re saying you’ve built up so much great momentum at work that it’s hard to let go of that. So, what is the biggest challenge right now? And what do you foresee as being challenging? Are there things you’re trying to prepare for?

Daria Polatin  

I think the challenge is there’s never going to be enough time for all of the things. And I just have to make peace with that. I’m always probably going to feel like I’m not doing enough in a certain area, whether it’s this project or that project or with my son or with my husband. There are a lot of things that I’m going to have to be comfortable with. There’s only so much pie, you know? 

One magical thing is that my son sleeps through the night now, and he didn’t at first. I will say, the first six weeks were very, very, very hard. I also had a C section. I was in labor for 56 hours.

Lara Ehrlich  

Oh my god, Daria.

Daria Polatin  

It was an emergency C section. So, it was a lot of recovery and still recovering. I think that people don’t talk about how much pregnancy and birth affects your body and the pain that women go through. I’m like, “This is insane!” And other mothers are like, “Yeah …”  I’m like, “My back hurts, this hurts, I have acid reflux.” And like, nobody talks about it. I think also, biologically, your body just makes you forget because it wants you to have another baby. I would mention something, and a girlfriend would be like, “Oh, yeah, that did happen to me and I forgot about that.” 

Anyway, so he started sleeping a decent amount after that growth spurt—the six-week growth spurt. I’m 6 feet tall and my husband is 6 1 1/2, so he’s a very tall, long baby. And he can hold his milk for a while, so that makes all the difference. I can get a decent stretch of sleep. If I did not, I don’t know that I could do what I’m doing. I can function on little sleep, but it’s trying.

Lara Ehrlich  

You were telling me before the interview started that your book has been picked up by Netflix. Tell us a little bit about that.

Daria Polatin  

When the book came out, I sold the development rights to a studio, and then I pitched the book with the studio, and because of my background as a TV writer, I pitched for me to adapt. Then we sold it to Netflix a couple of years ago. So, for the last couple of years, I’ve been writing the pilot as sort of “here’s what the show would be,” and we’ve done lots of different revisions. We brought in a director, and then finally a couple of days ago, they were like, “Great, we want to open a writers’ room and develop it as a as a limited series.” So, we’ll be starting that in January, which I’m so excited about. 

And it’s neat, because I’ve lived with this story for at least five years, and it’s really fun for me to bring it into television, the medium that I’ve spent the most time in, and to tell those stories visually and through dialogue. And another thing: the book was YA and mostly from the perspective of Jules, who’s 15. Jules and Mae will still have that Single White Female relationship between them, but it will also focus more on the mother, the psychiatrist who has this slow developing obsession with helping Mae, and it will continue to cause fissures in her family as the show goes on. It’ll be more of an adult drama, although there are still the teen characters.

Lara Ehrlich  

Congratulations. That’s so exciting. For anyone who didn’t catch the title, it’s Devil in Ohio, a YA novel now being transformed into a Netflix show. I want to get into how that book and how the story might change for you now that you’re a mother yourself, because the book very much is about mother- and daughter-hood and, as you said, the fissures that can be caused in a family when you allow in an unexpected element, which, in this case, is Mae, another 15-year-old girl from a questionable background. 

Let’s talk a little bit first just about that adaptation process. And then I want to move into motherhood and how it might impact the writing. But can you talk a little bit about how it might be different to adapt a book that you’ve written yourself into a TV show versus adapting or working on a script from say, Stephen King?

Daria Polatin  

Well, I think you have to have that same ruthlessness that you do with not your baby, not your creation. And it’s kind of challenging to do. It’s a muscle that I’ve developed over the years. In TV, you write stuff, something changes, you rewrite it, you got to throw it out, you kill your darlings—I’ve become comfortable with that process of “that scene doesn’t work anymore—let’s cut it” or “we don’t have the budget for that character,” and it hurts as a creator. But I kind of have that muscle developed. 

So even though it’s my work, it’s gotten easier to be like, “eh.” Every minute of TV costs a lot of money to use and a lot of effort and energy to make, so you have to really be relentless in refining every moment on screen. That’s important, because if not, it will get cut for budget, it will get cut in the editing room, if it doesn’t really sync up story-wise. So, I try to do the most work on the script and crafting the story and outlines so that by the time it’s shot, it’s all in. It’s what I want it to be.

Lara Ehrlich  

I’m interested to go back for a second to thinking about a story from the TV perspective, where every word has a cost value to it. I’m wondering when you wrote your novel, did you approach it in a similar way, because of that training from TV? Was it sort of like every sentence has to be packed with significance, every scene has to have action? Or was it different in some way?

Daria Polatin  

I tried to keep that rigorousness. I remember there was actually a chapter that I wrote that I really loved. It was a scene where the mother took the young girl shoe shopping. It was really kind of creepy because she got down and was putting the shoe on her, and it was a real kind of reversal of power. One way to interpret status is by height and who’s standing. You know, you kneel to the queen—I’ve been watching The Crown. Mae is sitting, and Suzanne [Jules’s mother] is literally at her feet, which was kind of a weird, creepy scene, to me, that I envisioned and wrote, and then we ended up cutting it because it just didn’t feel like it had a place. Now maybe for the TV show we have room for that scene. Maybe it’s part of the story we’re telling in that episode. 

Obviously, we’re telling the story over the arc of the whole season, but I really love when each episode has an arc to it. The Crown does that really well. Each episode contains a theme, a question, and an answer. So, I tried to do that and make sure everything in that episode was really lining up with that. 

So back to your question. I tried to keep the relentlessness of the storytelling, but, you know, there are fewer cooks in the kitchen. There’s my manager, my agent, a couple of friends, the editor, whereas in TV, you’ve got a writers’ room, you’ve got the producers, you have the studio executives, you have the network executives; when we’re filming, you get the director’s point of view, you get the actors’ saying, “I really don’t want to say this line” and “I don’t think my character would say this.” Okay. All right. “Well, what do you think they would say?” You have a lot more cooks in the kitchen, and something has to make it all the way through editing. 

In streaming, you can have different length episodes, but on broadcasts, it has to be a certain number of pages, and it has to run a certain length, because that’s all you have. So, things get really, really, really changed in the process of TV usually. I think books are the most direct connection between author and reader. There’s the least interference in that form of written material, which was interesting, to have that direct of a relationship with the reader or with the experiencer, the consumer of the story.

Lara Ehrlich  

What is it like now, to take the book, that you have the least amount of interference with, and then hand it over to a writers’ room and to all of these people who will bring it to life?

Daria Polatin  

Luckily, I’m the showrunner and I’m the creator and executive producer. That’s why I do like TV, because you get to have the authority over the process and hopefully, ultimately, the final product. But yeah, it’s really different. Things come up that are different than I might have thought—people pitching ideas, or the story just kind of evolves, like Peter [Jules’s father] is becoming a much more evolved character than in the novel. And we’re driving a lot more into Suzanne [Jules’s mother] and bringing more to the page that I had in mind for her backstory in life and other things that were going on for her, but it’s articulated more now. 

I guess if it were like a “This is me on the page” type of story, it might be trickier, but, though I love my characters and relate to my characters, ultimately, they’re characters, and things are gonna get shifted around. You know, you pick your battles. Some things you fight for, some things are like, “Okay, fine. I’ll take that note for now. But this other thing, I feel really strongly about, and I really want to keep this scene because of this, this, and this.”

Lara Ehrlich  

And as you’re writing the first couple episodes of the show and changing that perspective from primarily the 15-year-old to now the mother’s point of view, and now a mother yourself, are you seeing your experience as a new mother playing into the story?

Daria Polatin  

It’s really interesting because I wrote this book from the experience of being a daughter and sister, and now, I have the experience of being a mother. So I’m interested to see how that changes. I certainly understand now this very visceral, sort of primal, almost monster feeling of doing anything for your child. This sort of Mama Bear. I have a new understanding, a visceral understanding, of what that is.

Lara Ehrlich  

I know you probably can’t tell us too much about what you’re planning for the show, but looking back at the novel, has the experience of motherhood deepened your understanding of the relationship between Suzanne and Jules?

Daria Polatin  

Definitely. And I’m interested to see how that progresses. Of course, any character I write, I emotionally put myself in their shoes, so I can know what they’re thinking and feeling, but I’m excited to continue that process as we move forward in the show. And this show triangulates between the mother and Jules’ and Mae’s perspective, almost like a love triangle, in a weird way. Motherhood is still very new to me, so it’s all kind of unfolding.

Lara Ehrlich  

What’s not new to you that I found interesting is that you said that for the mother and daughter relationship in that book, you could draw from your own experience as a daughter. So, what was your relationship like with your mother? And how did that set your expectations for motherhood?

Daria Polatin  

I grew up mostly with my mother as a single mother and with my sister. So that sort of triangular relationship between the mother and two sister figures like Suzanne and Jules and Mae is similar to me and my mom and my sister. I was growing up with a single mother who worked a lot, and my sister and I never quite got enough time. We just never got enough from her because she was, obviously, stretched in a lot of different directions. That is maybe emblematic of Jules and Mae relationship—both kind of vying for Suzanne’s love and attention and how Jules feels so betrayed that her mother is paying attention to this pseudo sister. So that probably comes from my own psychology and upbringing.

Lara Ehrlich  

How did that set your expectations for the type of mother that you want to be?

Daria Polatin  

I want to be a safe space for my son, and I want to be a grounded place that he can always come to, for comfort in whatever form that would be. It’s sort of a challenge for me to really be present for him. Not to say that my mother wasn’t, but it was hard. And my father was not around very much, and now my husband is the opposite. He’s very present. We both just want to be very present and grounded, for our son to be able to be grounded and present himself. 

It’s working so far. He’s pretty chill. He’s able to kind of regulate and settle down, and he knows we’re coming to feed him; he knows his needs will be met. Of course, he speaks up when he’s too tired or too hungry, which is great. But now we’re just trying to provide for him in a really supportive but not overbearing way. And I didn’t feel that as a child, not to any lack of trying on my mother’s part. I won’t say the same about my father. But I’m, of course, always trying to do things in a better way than in the past and what I had. So. Goals.

Lara Ehrlich  

What expectations did you have, or do you have, since you’re still so new at motherhood? What expectations do you have about being a mother and a writer and all of the other roles that you inhabit—TV producer and a wife and a sister and a daughter. How are you putting some strategies in place for balancing those things? Do you have fears surrounding that? 

Daria Polatin  

I’m fearful of not having enough time for all of it. But mainly, the most important would be feeling like I’m not having enough time for my son, because he’s the most vulnerable of all of those elements. I was actually talking to my husband about bringing in a nanny, once I start opening the writers’ room. He’s around, he’s a writer as well, but I think we’re gonna bring in someone at least part-time to start, maybe more. I’m just gonna need to be running a TV show. But I started crying, because I think the mom guilt is really very real. 

I guess just trying to stay grounded and teach through example, taking care of the things I need to take care of is an important thing to do. If I just sacrificed my career and stopped and became a mother full-time, that’s not serving me, and I wouldn’t be happy, and that wouldn’t be serving him. 

Just practically, I think I’m gonna keep my mornings with him, keep that really special time that I have with him from when he wakes up to when I would go to the office, from like 6 to 10, and really spend that time with him. And then spend time with him before bed. So, kind of carving out those periods of time to just really be with him and try not to be on my phone too much and just be present with him for those times. That’s my goal. And then during the day, I have an office in our backyard, and as I have breaks, I will come in and be with him as I eat lunch with him, that kind of thing.

Lara Ehrlich  

That sounds like a good strategy. It’s so hard, especially when they’re only a couple of weeks old. I remember going to the first daycare appointment for my daughter to check out different daycares before she was even born, and we got back in the car, and I just started bawling. It was so hard to think about, but as people have told me, and it’s true, it doesn’t get easier, it just gets different. And that’s helpful, or that was helpful for me to hear that. Like, there’s never gonna be a point where it’s like, “Oh, I’ve got it. And now it’s easy.” You’ll get it and then it’ll change, and then you’ll have to get it all over again. And that’s okay.

Daria Polatin  

It is sort of a revolving door. His needs change very quickly—like, he’s doing that now, and we’re just trying to figure out what he needs and what we need to give to him. Now he loves sitting in his swing, and he looks at this thing going around for like 20 minutes. And I’m like, you know what? He’s fine. It’s just a lot of observation. You have to be very present to be able to assess the circumstances and kind of get out of your own expectations of what he might need, because it might have changed. There’s a real, almost meditative, Zen-like, stepping back and just looking at things with a clear, fresh perspective and not projecting expectations onto him.

Lara Ehrlich  

Yeah, I think that’s very wise. Actually, I have to remember that myself. And I think that helps with mom guilt, too, right? Because that’s where the expectations are. It’s what you expect of yourself as a mother. Taking that step back and saying, “Well, maybe my child doesn’t need that, in this moment”—the thing that I expect of myself, or the thing that I think I should be, that’s not what they need from me as their mother in this moment. So, tell us, where we can get Devil in Ohio, which I have read and I will recommend to everybody, and then where we can watch it and when? What’s the timeline?

Daria Polatin  

The book, you can get on Amazon or at your local bookseller. You probably have to order it. There’s also the audiobook. It’s very weird to listen to it, because it’s like, a different voice than the one in my head. But there is an audio book, and there is Kindle. It’s a fun, kind of quick read, a fun gift to a young reader—I would say seventh or eighth grade, depending on their exposure to thriller. There are definitely some mature themes. And ideally, I think this show would air in 2022. We would write it and make it next year and edit it, and who knows what their slate will be then, but that would be the general idea.

Lara Ehrlich  

Well, it’s very exciting. And I’m glad that we got to talk about it tonight, too. And hopefully people are bookmarking that timeframe so that we can all watch it and then have you back when your show will be out and your son will be older and we can have a whole different conversation.

Daria Polatin  

Oh my gosh, yeah. He’ll be walking around. Probably.

Lara Ehrlich  

Thank you so much, Daria, for joining us. This has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming tonight and for talking honestly and openly about your family and about your work. It’s been wonderful.

Daria Polatin  

Thank you so much for having me.

Lara Ehrlich  

And thank you all for joining us. You can watch the video again, you can listen to the episode as a podcast, and you can read the interview transcript in a day or so on writermothermonster.com. And if you enjoyed the conversation, again, please consider becoming a Writer Mother Monster patron or patroness on Patreon. Thank you all again, and we’ll see you next week.