In late 2021, two apparently unconnected but nonetheless major – to me – events occurred.
One, a now infamous New Yorker profile of the actor Jeremy Strong was published. Two, I gave birth.
I saw Twitter’s response to the profile before I even read it. Strong was being roundly derided for his intensity; I immediately felt protective of him. I was sure the writer had not only completely misunderstood him but cruelly taken advantage of his honesty. What’s his crime, I thought? He took his work seriously? Oh, he tried?
I huffed in defence of the celebrity who, it must be said, is a complete stranger to me, and then four days later I gave birth. Defending the actor would have to wait: I was suddenly a mother.
I resolved to stay off Twitter during maternity leave (please don’t make me say X!). I’d grown exhausted from watching writers and artists perform their irony and detachment.
I was sick of it, and I was about to have a year away from my publishing job, a year in which I planned for my new, offline, mother-self to seamlessly merge with my old selves: writer, reader.
You can imagine my shock when the birth of my daughter also heralded the loss of my ability to read. Soft-focus daydreams of reading novels while nursing, and writing while the baby napped in her cot (lol) were nothing like the reality: hours spent bouncing her in the dark, the occasional scream into a pillow; entire seasons of Love Island UK consumed on mobile, my sad and illiterate face made alive with blue light.
I couldn’t get my baby to sleep, I couldn’t exercise, I couldn’t cook a meal, I couldn’t socialise without overwhelming anxiety. All of these things were arguably more urgent than whether or not I could read, and yet the reading upset me so much because without reading, I couldn’t imagine ever writing again.
I thought what I needed to read or write was time, distance and space. I needed air, the way fire does. All I had was kindling, made up of former versions of myself, and any attempts to conjure something was like striking matches from the past. Things that had worked before would not work now.
I was desperate. What would bring it back?
Would it be the sight of my infant daughter’s fingers clumsily pulling petals from the first red camellia she saw? Would it be any one of the writers whose books about motherhood and creativity and art were piled on my bedside table, dog-eared at page two?
What ultimately did it was, unfortunately, a man: Jeremy Strong saved me.
When my daughter was 10 months old, I was on a dazed afternoon walk timed with a nap when I saw that Strong had given a new interview on WTF with Marc Maron. While the baby slept, at last, I listened to Strong speak about searching for joy through his work and about his desire to act even when the audience wasn’t there.
After missing out on several roles in a row, he asked himself: if there was nobody there to see it but it was nourishing his spirit, would he keep going? He says he would. (You might say that, conveniently for the purpose of this self-reflection, he did not actually have to find out.) But I believe him.
I thought back to the New Yorker profile, which alleged that, on Succession, “Jeremy Strong doesn’t get the joke.” Well, thank God he didn’t! As Kendall Roy, he so perfectly portrayed a bruised spirit and a palpable fragility; he simmered with an intense thrum of momentum on the verge of self-destruction or greatness at any given moment.
Without his loftiness, without his earnest belief, the character of Kendall would have become utterly one-note and the show a parody. Succession needed Strong keening in grief in the dirt as much as it needed Kieran Culkin skulking at the board table.
Strong talks of being an actor as being in service to others. In the early days of motherhood, I was in service only to my daughter. My job was to keep her fed, rested and clean. It was necessary and it was, I can see now, beautiful, but it required shutting off from the world.
The interviews with Strong reached something instinctual in me and I opened back up. In the interviews I found a belief in the consequence and possibility of art. I found not just permission to try, but eagerness to.
Strong told Maron, quoting Spinoza – from memory, of course – “Desire is the essence of man.” He continued, “Desire gets a bad rap sometimes, not carnal desire, physical desire, but passion, being the engine of life. I love this work because you get to be a student forever.”
Who talks like that? That’s what I want! I realised, suddenly alive on this walk. The same traits that social media found worthy of derision – Strong’s seriousness, self-belief, even his self-importance – were inspirational to me.
Other mothers will remember their own moments in that first year where you feel yourself coming back. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say you feel a new self emerging, one that can coexist with your mother self. It’s a moment where life feels possible.
I can still go back to that particular walk, I can remember the yellow leaves on the footpath. I texted a friend: “Jeremy Strong got me believing I can go to drama school. I’m 34!”
Even off social media, I hid my desire in a joke. What I really meant was: I remember what it feels like to care, and to be curious, and if I can teach my daughter nothing else, I want to teach her that.
What I really meant was: Jeremy Strong got me coming back to life.
Léa Antigny is a writer based in Sydney
