My Wife Wrote a Novel-Length Fan Fic

And I interviewed her about joining fandom at 38 and how our relationship informed her Villanelle and Eve.

After the Killing Eve series finale, my wife, Stacy, sat down and wrote a novel-length fan fiction about the show. She’s an award-winning film editor, but she’d hadn’t expressed herself through creative writing since I’d met her almost 13 years ago. She also hadn’t been involved in any kind of fandom since 2011. Watching her craft her story was one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen anyone do, and it made me fall in love with her all over again — so I asked if I could interview her about what it was like to join fandom at 38, why it was so important to her to write this story, and how our own relationship informed the relationship she imagined for her favorite TV characters.

When writing up a profile or interview, I think you’re supposed to say what the person was wearing and eating, so I’ll say: When Stacy came downstairs the day of this interview, she was wearing sneakers, which sent me into a panic because it was the weekend which meant she should have been in her weekend slippers. “Are we leaving the house today or something???” I screeched. Luckily, we were not. She ate a bowl of Rice Chex and drank a cup of coffee.

Heather: Hello, my love. So this year you wrote a novel-length Killing Eve fan fiction, which was your first full-length novel and your first fan fiction. And you did it at the tender age of — how old are you even? 36? 37? God, we met when you were just a baby. 

Stacy, doing math on her phone calculator: We're in 2023, aren't we? Oh, I guess I'm 38.

Heather: This pandemic has absolutely destroyed my sense of time. And ability to count. Anyhoodle, what I was saying was that you joined the fan works community at the tender age of 38. What made you do it? 

Stacy: Well, this was kind of a perfect situation for me, in the sense that it was a perfect shit storm for me to wander into. I felt — or, actually, I still feel, present tense — very connected to these two characters in a rare way. I watch a lot of TV, film, read a lot of things, but it's really unusual for me to feel so drawn to two characters. I think Eve and Villanelle are so unique, and I think the way the show ended was brutal and thoughtless and, frankly, cruel for the sake of cruelty. Queer people are not strangers to the kind of classic careless storytelling where writers seem to think that being cruel automatically elevates their writing and makes it prestigious and automatically good, when that's not the case, more often than not. 

Heather: I want to come back to the idea of cruelty and queer storytelling, but I also want to talk about what made you feel so attached to Eve and Villanelle? 

Stacy: I think the special thing about Killing Eve — excluding how it ended — was that it actively celebrated complex, dark, funny, fucked up, messy women in a way that I don't see in a lot of media. There's a lot of messy female characters all over the place now, but there is something really interesting about Eve and Villanelle, in how they are unapologetically who they are and the show doesn't scold them for it — again, excluding the ending. We also recently came out of an era, or maybe we're still in it, where there were a million celebrated shows about antihero men, like Breaking Bad, Mad Men, going as far back as The Sopranos. There's a bajillion examples of this. Killing Eve was a rare show where it wasn't just about an antihero — there were two of them, and they were women, and not just women but women who were completely obsessed with each other [laughs]. 

It also gave viewers permission to indulge in these darker parts of themselves. It made queer women feel like, even if you were someone who struggled with whatever darkness means to you as an individual — I'm not saying actual assassins and killing people and stuff, but anyone who has any kind of "darkness" within them — that you are still worthy of adoration and love and the acknowledgement that you're complicated. You're never only one thing.

Maybe Yellowjackets is sort of filling that space now, but it's not quite the same, at least for me. I don't think there's been a show like Killing Eve before, and I kind of feel like there might not ever be again.

Heather: Right, it's incredibly rare to have any kind of show where there are two queer women leads. To have them be anti-heroes on top of that? I don't think we'd ever had that before. 

Stacy: And the show really didn't give a fuck about men almost ever. Which I appreciated [laughs]. I guess The L Word didn't really give a fuck about men either, but that show didn't click with me at all.

Heather: Yeah, I mean that was the thing — besides Eve and Villanelle's chemistry — that finally convinced me to watch it, even though I generally do not watch shows with blood or murder. The fact that Killing Eve essentially de-centered the feelings of all men. The way that most prestige television shows treat women — which is as accessories, as characters that propel along the plots of the men, as almost disposable — that's how Killing Eve treated men. It was kind of like Carol in that way, never once focusing on the pleasure of any dude. 

Stacy: I think it's really telling that one of the most impactful and important men on Killing Eve — even by the end of the show, and just even in the way fans talk about the show — is Bill, who gets killed in the third episode. Obviously Niko's important, but Eve doesn't give a shit about him so it's hard for us as viewers to really give a shit about him. 

Heather: Right, that's a kind of recurring theme from the very beginning of the show. People saying to Eve, "I'm sorry you don't like your husband." "I'm sorry your husband is the most boring person on earth." I want to talk a little bit about why Eve's queerness, specifically, resonates with you. Eve doesn't have a clue that she could be anything other than straight until she's in her 40s. You came out as a teenager. I'm fascinated by how much her story really gets to you. 

Stacy: A lot of times shows with queer characters make a really big deal out of their queerness. It's like a central facet to the actual plot of the show or whatever. And I really liked in Killing Eve how the fact that these two women were queer was completely— well, not irrelevant because it's a big part of who they are as characters, and it adds to the show that they're queer. Like it would be a different show if it was a straight assassin, or a male assassin, that Eve was tracking. It's not the same show anymore. So it's not that it's not important, but there's never a point where Eve feels compelled to say, "I'm bisexual." Right, and Villanelle never refers to herself as a lesbian. It's just an inherent part of who they are. The way it concerns itself with queer identity and queer space is a lot more subtle than many other shows with queer characters. 

Heather: That's wild because that is one of the things that really drew me to you in the beginning of our relationship, which is that you are so unapologetically a lesbian, and yet it is — to lean into Cosima's thinking on Orphan Black — not the most interesting thing about you. It's an essential part of your identity and it informs everything about how you move through the world,  but it's sort of a core part of who you are, and you're orbited by a zillion other fascinating things. 

Yeah. And look, I don't wanna undersell the queerness. There's something really radical about the fact that Villanelle is this stereotypically or traditionally gorgeous blonde woman assassin. Normally this is the type of character that you would have screwing men in every episode, right? You could still have the men be disposable, but no. She's so unapologetically into women and has no emotional or mental space to give a fuck about any man. Eve too, unearthing this queerness later in life and finally giving in to her desires. Absolutely radical. And there's no after-school special episode about Eve coming to terms with her bisexuality. She fucking grabs Helene by the face and makes out with her as a power play.

Heather: Definitely. A show like Killing Eve would usually allow men to project themselves into a position of being able to sexualize Villanelle in a personal way, as an entry point to the series. But the one time you see Villanelle with a man, with Sebastian in season one— 

Stacy: Yes! It's a fucking joke! She's clearly not into it. She doesn't get off on it. Half the reason she even sleeps with him is because she gets turned on by a woman on the street. That's the same with Eve. Any time we see her getting horny with Niko, it's because of Villanelle. 

Heather: We talked a little bit about the cruelty of the ending of Killing Eve, and I'm curious because most prestige TV is brutal in some way to its characters. You know, even Succession, which just ended, all the characters are even more miserable than they were when they met them — even the ones who got exactly what they wanted. I guess I want to ask: what do you think is the difference between being brutal toward your characters and being cruel toward your audience?

Stacy: I think it's important for me to say that I didn't need a traditional happy ending for Eve and Villanelle. In fact, I didn't expect the show to give them a happy ending. I honestly thought they were both gonna die somehow, but together. Or for it to be left ambiguous, but with them together. During or after the first season, Phoebe Waller-Bridge said something like — if this show doesn't end with the two of them alone in a room together, it would be a betrayal to the audience

The problem with what they actually did is they broke all the rules of their own show. You know, you mentioned Succession. Even though that ending was brutal, it felt very true to the show's themes and rules and the characters. Killing Eve's ending felt like it threw all of that stuff in the trash. And a lot of it was made worse after the fact. The shit they said after the finale aired was insane. Like, referring to Eve as an "every woman" is literally insane to me and is a complete misreading of her from episode one of the whole series.

Heather: One of our favorite games to play is to watch old episodes of Killing Eve, and then when Eve does the most outrageous stuff, be like, "There's our Every Woman!" 

Stacy: And for them to say that Villanelle went to some celestial plane after she died is also fucking insane! But ignoring the shit said after the finale, it was like they took their unapologetically queer antihero, this iconic character, and turned her into a plot device for another character to realize she's "normal." To symbolize Eve being "reborn," like Villanelle dying somehow saved Eve from queer corruption. Whether that was their intention or not, it's how it came across.

And it also felt like they were punishing Eve for accepting who she really is. You know, throughout the course of season four, Eve really embraces her darkness. And for most of the final episode, we see Eve finally in a place of acceptance with herself and with her feelings for Villanelle. Then that ending happens. Like, the show was never interested in morality lessons until suddenly at the very end? And look, it’s true that destruction and chaos follow Eve, it’s part of her character. But because of how they structured the last episode and the last season overall, the ending felt like punishment specifically for giving in to her "not normal," or queer, desires. It just felt—I don't know what the right word is. I was going to say "hopeless," but again, I didn't expect the show to end on a hopeful note necessarily. 

Heather: It feels regressive, in a Hays Code kind of way. 

Stacy: Yes, that's exactly right. It's so classic. It's like, you know, there's the Bury Your Gays trope, and then within that trope, there's the very overused example, which is two women finally giving in to their attraction for each other, their love or desire — and then two seconds later shooting one of them dead. Or like running one of them over with a car or whatever.

Heather: Like the Comics Code Authority, which existed in tandem with the Hays Code in the 1950s, literally demanded, "Good shall triumph over evil."  It essentially said, "Fine, you can explore the lives of these queer characters however you want, as long as they are punished in the end. Because we can't let the audience think that it's okay to actually act on these gay impulses. Do it, but they can't come out of it alive."

Stacy: Right, and the way they talked about that scene afterwards was that Eve ("straight" being the unintended, or maybe intended, implication) belongs with life and Villanelle (queer) belongs with death.

Heather: That sets the stage for why you were so disappointed and hurt — but what compelled you to start actually writing?

Stacy: I watched the last episode two weeks before most people because you had screeners. And that was awful. I had so much time to sit with it without any input from anyone else. By the time it aired publicly, I was still very hurt, but I had processed a lot of thoughts about it. One thing that really frustrated me with the later seasons was how they seemed terrified to write conversations between Eve and Villanelle. They'd be in rooms together and maybe say like four words to each other. Or the writers would concoct ways to keep them apart. That was another feeling of dissatisfaction with the ending. The whole season passed and they never had a real conversation.

So anyway, after the show ended I was thinking about, what would happen right after this point, if Villanelle survived? What would be true to these characters? I also didn't want to accept that Villanelle was dead because the way they killed her was so ridiculous. And — sidebar — physically impossible. If you do any research into bullets and water whatsoever, plus it was nighttime and the Thames is filthy… but fine. A magical, faceless sniper. Whatever. So I was trying to think in my imagination, what could happen after this? And the fic just kind of unfurled in my mind. 

Heather: We should probably do a quick summary of your fanfiction. In Saving Eve, Villanelle survives and washes up on one side of the Thames, and Eve unknowingly swims to the opposite side and gets arrested and ends up in Broadmoor, which is the high-security psychiatric hospital that we spend a little time in on the show. Your story opens with Eve finding out Villanelle is alive and then follows them as they try to get revenge on Carolyn Martens for fucking them over in the last season. But then, you know, also trying to work out whether the revenge is worth it, and how to heal from their pasts, and all sorts of internal conflicts. 

So what did you hope to accomplish for the characters and then what did you hope to accomplish for people who had also been hurt by the show like you had been? 

Stacy: I will say one thing about my fic that's very different from the show is that it really attempts to deal with the trauma that both of these characters have experienced, both recently in the show, but also historically in their lives. The show didn't really care much about doing a deep dig into trauma. And for the characters, I wanted them to have fucking conversations! I wanted to put them in a scenario where they would be forced to talk to each other. I kind of approached it not like a "will they or won't they," but more like a "could they, and how." If they were to attempt a serious relationship, like an actual relationship and not just games and sexual tension, what would that look like? How could it succeed? Could it succeed? What would have to happen for it to succeed?

I also really wanted healing for myself and the readers. I had a goal of— yes, it has a happy ending, you could say, but it's still messy. Like they're both kind of broken. But what could be a version of peace for them, despite that? I felt like the only way I could feel healed was to really dive into their trauma, really have difficult, hard scenes and conversations while being realistic about who they are as people. Eve can't just drop her obsessions and suddenly be like, yes, let's just have a serious relationship. And Villanelle has never had someone who cared about her, or legitimately cared about anyone else. So that's new for her too. You've read my story. It's really harsh in a lot of places. And that's the thing about the show with the ending, like, it's not that I’m saying it can't be harsh or hard or brutal. I'm really brutal to them sometimes in this fic, I think.

Heather: Let's run through some things you did to them in the story. Eve gets recaptured and held in an MI6 black site, after being in a criminal psychiatric hospital for a year and a half. You have Villanelle dealing with a lot of physical and emotional pain. One of the best things about your story — to me, as a person with chronic pain and disability — is that you don't shy away from the physical ramifications of what happened to her. Villanelle had spinal shock from getting shot. You drove them off a cliff!! They almost drowned! 

Stacy: Again. 

Heather: Right, AGAIN. Eve's dealing with PTSD and nightmares. You were not gentle with them. 

Stacy: If you're gonna have a story about dark, messy women, then they have to be dark and messy. I wrote it pretty selfishly, honestly. You keep saying: what did I want to give to the readers? But a lot of it was — what did I want to give to me, for myself? I wanted to show how much work goes into having a real relationship, especially with two people who have never been inclined to that. And then, I really wanted to see if these two women could get to a place within themselves, not even as a couple necessarily but within each of themselves as individuals, where they could feel at peace with these different dichotomies within themselves.

Heather: It seemed to me like your main thing at first was making sure Villanelle was alive, but as you wrote the story, you actually fell in love with Eve all over again, in a way that expanded even beyond how you loved her on the show, which I thought was really interesting. 

Stacy: Part of the frustration with season four is that Eve's more baffling decisions are never explained. So one of the things about writing my story was that, while I do switch POVs between them, it's most often from Eve's point of view. There was something about forcing myself to try to think through why she did the things she did. Why is she so obsessive? Why does she keep repeating these cycles of behavior? Why, after she almost lost Villanelle earlier in the season when Villanelle was shot with an arrow, and that was meant to be like a wake-up call for Eve — why did she then immediately go back to her obsession with The Twelve? Why is she like this?? And because a fic is not a serialized TV show, I could stay in her head as long as I wanted to stay in her head.

I didn't expect, when I was living in Eve's POV, how affectionate I actually ended up feeling towards her and how much empathy I had for her. The amount of trauma she had. Everyone deals with trauma differently. I just felt like I grew an understanding of her that the show never gave me a window into. There was something in forcing myself to grapple with her shit, and in the process forcing her to grapple with her shit, that felt cathartic in a way I didn't anticipate.

Heather: I mentioned at the beginning that you're 38. I don't actually think that people outside of fandom and fan works culture really understand that there's such a broad age of people who are engaging in fan works. Being 38, being a person who's married, who's been with your partner for 12 years, who has dealt with your own trauma and who has stood beside me as I've dealt with my own trauma. How did our real life relationship inform how you approached the story? Or did it inform it at all? 

Stacy: Well, it informed everything. I'd say a recurring comment I got throughout was about how emotionally mature the story felt. I received a comment from a fellow fanfic writer, who I really respect, that said they really appreciated my understanding of how the process of dealing with trauma and building a relationship with another person is never linear. It requires really hard work, and there's no guarantee that you're not gonna relapse or that it's not gonna just keep showing up.

You and I have both put in a lot of work in our own lives, and also together, in dealing with our extensive childhood traumas. Even adult traumas. We both are realistic and honest with each other. We love each other and we get along very naturally, very easily — but still, in a real relationship where you're committing yourself to another person, it's hard work if you want it to last. It doesn't matter how easily you click or whatever. And that's not a bad thing. People put a negative connotation on saying something is hard work, but the work and the result of that work is what's fulfilling. I know what it takes to make a long term committed relationship work with someone I am naturally drawn to, someone I adore, someone who sees me in ways no one else does, and someone I see that way too, but also someone who has her own trauma that interacts in really complicated ways with my trauma. With Villanelle and Eve, they're the only two people who see each other in the ways they do, but that doesn't mean they're just going to get together and everything will be absolutely fine. Plus, obviously they're both a little bit — or a lot of bit — on the psychopathy scale. 

If Killing Eve had aired before I met you, like let's say that ending happened when I was in my twenties and I wrote a fic afterwards, my story wouldn't have looked anything like this, I don't think. How could it have?

Heather: One of the gratifying things that I experienced reading this story is that while I don't personally identify with Villanelle or Eve very much, I did identify with their relationship, the way you wrote it. In addition to our trauma, there's some neurodivergency going on for both of us. We had, from the moment that we met, a really magical connection that I've certainly never experienced with another person and that has never waned, but that alchemy that's us together, it doesn't just erase all the tough work of building your life alongside another person. 

Stacy: Yes, exactly.

Heather: And then of course, I deeply resonated with the ways Villanelle had to grapple with the changes in her physical ability after she got shot. They affect not only what she is capable of doing, but also how she thinks about herself. I got Long Covid three and a half years ago and it completely changed both of our lives because, well, it changed everything about my body and some things about my brain. How did being a caretaker to me inform the way that you made Eve a caretaker to Villanelle? Or did it? 

Stacy: I think it did. Though Villanelle is pretty far along in her recovery from spinal shock where I pick up the story. I do dip into it in a flashback, where you see that she was bedridden for a time and had to rely on someone else to take care of her. But by the time she's with Eve, she's not in that place anymore. She's dealing with chronic pain, but she's healed a lot from when she first got hurt. And in a lot of ways Villanelle is actually forced to be a caretaker to Eve, in that Eve is in emotional and psychological distress after they reunite. So that's complicated too. But no, Villanelle is definitely not the same as she was before, physically or emotionally. It was important for me to emphasize that when this kind of disabling thing happens to a person, you don't have some magical return to form. After the shooting, and especially after another incident that happens later in my story, she's never going back to everything she could do before. And I wanted to look at how that affects her self-image — and I do think this is true to you and I, too.

I would say you are the caretaker in our house mostly. 'cause I'm very self-involved with my work and I get overwhelmed easily with everyday tasks. That's just part of my personality. So you're the caretaker in the traditional sense, with our cats and with me and with everything, even just like cleaning, cooking, providing nutrition for our family, all of it. And when you got Long Covid — well, first of all, you've healed a lot too, but you're not back to what you were from before, and probably never will be, not fully. There was a big adjustment here for you and for me, but I think also like the way you still sometimes struggle with your self-image. You've been a caretaker your whole life. And needing to feel self-sufficient has also been a part of you your whole life, and not having to rely on others for anything.

I don't think you have much in common with Villanelle, besides mainly that desire to be self-reliant. She never wanted to, or had the ability to, ask anyone for help with anything. And so there is a parallel between me and you, and Villanelle and Eve in my story, in the sense of Villanelle being forced to grapple with needing help sometimes. To understand it's okay, it's not a negative thing to rely on the person you love, who loves you. Villanelle used to view herself — and this is kind of how I viewed you for a little while — as being invincible. Not that you couldn't get sick or hurt or knocked down, but that nothing could ever keep you down. Villanelle, to Eve, was kind of beyond human, and honestly, I think she sort of viewed herself as beyond human. And maybe sometimes you did too. 

Heather: Oh, absolutely. And I would go as far as saying that the emotional fallout of learning that I am not, in fact, invincible was as hard — or maybe even harder — for me than the loss of my physical abilities. 

Stacy: Right and see, Eve in my story finds Villanelle even more beautiful actually now that the sheen of invincibility is gone. Because it feels more real and it gives their relationship — weirdly, even though there are hard parts about it — more of a solid ground to stand on.

Heather: Absolutely. And I think that's true to our experience as well. I think I couldn't have understood it at the time when I first got sick, but I think our relationship has deepened beyond anything I could have imagined by me just being vulnerable, like literally physically vulnerable, and then allowing myself to be emotionally vulnerable and saying, you know, I trust you to be able to take care of me and to want to take care of me. When I first got sick, I spent a lot of time just laying awake in the middle of the night thinking about how unfair it was to you that I couldn't do what I used to be able to do anymore. And I never think that now. But that was a HUGE process, to get there, even though I think made us closer.

Stacy: Yeah. And it's always a process. I mean, similarly to how I was saying that dealing with emotional trauma is always a process. It's never linear. I also think that's true of physical trauma. It is a cycle.

Heather: The cyclical nature of pain and trauma comes up a lot in your story. 

Stacy: Right, like even when Villanelle can acknowledge, "Oh fuck, my back hurts," she's still stubborn about it sometimes. And so are you sometimes. And you know, we have this conflict, often, where you'll be like, "All right, I'm going to do these 75 different physical tasks in the next hour, and 17 loads of laundry, and then I have these 5 work deadlines, and I can't say no to this Zoom, and go go go." God, and people constantly demanding things from you, even when you've told them a thousand times that it causes you great physical ramifications to do them! And I'll say, "Hey, maybe you could say no to that, maybe you could do half of these things another day, maybe you could do it on a day when it's not 120 degrees."

Now it's easier for you to see where I'm coming from, but for a long time — and maybe sometimes still now — you're hearing something I'm not saying, which is that you're weak or incapable or something like that. Like a value judgment on you. When really I just want you to feel as okay as you can! 

Heather: I agree with everything you're saying. And I did deeply resonate with that in your story. I want to just touch on the fact that you're a film editor, but you got your start in film, and got into film school, writing screenplays. But you haven't done creative writing—

Stacy: Yeah, not since university. 

Heather: What was the adjustment like? Opening up the creative part of your brain in a new/old way?

Stacy: I don't know how to explain it. This story was just there inside of me. I think the outline I wrote at the beginning is basically what the story ended up being, which is pretty surprising because it took me a whole year to write it. And a lot of things happened during that year and my feelings about certain things changed and the fandom changed and this and that changed. And yet I still stayed true to my original outline. Not stubbornly! It just felt like the story was already there in me to write. 

Heather: When you started writing, you wrote several chapters before you published anything. Having not written in a long time, having not written any fan works, you started writing and then as you wrote, you were updating chapter by chapter. And one of the things that changed was that you started getting a lot of readers and engagement and feedback. Did that change your process at all? Did it change the way you thought about writing? 

Stacy: It never changed what I wrote. I didn't ever change the story because I was like, oh, readers are gonna like this or they're gonna hate that. But it did make me more nervous. Like if I wrote a chapter where they had a big fight, I was like, "Oh God, am I gonna get 30 comments of people yelling at me?" And I was very nervous when I posted the first chapter because I had not creatively written in so long, and I didn't know how people would respond to it or if the quality was up to par. Especially because the first chapter is quite depressing. In fact, I wrote a version of the first chapter that was twice as long and twice as depressing. But I was too scared to publish it. I was like, no one's gonna read this new writer doing 10,000 words of Eve's fucking depression era, right out the gate. So I chickened out and I trimmed it way back. Now I regret it when I reread it. I'm like, oh, this first chapter isn't fleshed out well enough at all. Anyway, two things happened simultaneously — I became nervous of how readers would react, but then at the same time, I gained more confidence in my writing the more engagement I got. Eventually I wasn't scared to publish a 10,000 word chapter if it felt right for the story.

Heather: One thing that I really loved about this process that took you a little bit over a year to do — For me, I immediately started writing professionally for the queer internet almost as soon as I came out. So there has never been a time where I have been gay and have not been surrounded by community. And not just community in the sense of other gay people, but because I write about TV and movies and books and video games and things that I love, I have made friends and been surrounded by people with very similar interests to me. And you haven't always had that. So, for me, watching you become a part of this fan community, I treasured it so much. It makes my heart really warm to think about it. Can you talk about that? 

Stacy: Yeah. I mean, I have only been a part of a fandom one other time in my life. And that was with Naomi and Emily from Skins. 

Heather: Shoot, we should say we met through fandom. We didn't say that. We met between seasons three and four of Skins. 

Stacy: Fucking Skins. Talk about people thinking cruelty automatically makes good writing. Anyway. That's also the only other time I read fanfiction in my life, but I didn't write any. My initial experience with the Killing Eve fandom was actually still kind of from a distance, but then, at the end, I was just sitting on all that pain and anger and I was kind of desperate for community around it. It's probably embarrassing now, but I vomited out all my feelings for like a week straight. And I think that time period changed my relationship with the fandom where I was really eagerly devouring other people's point of views. I think the vast majority, not everyone, but the vast majority of people hated the show's ending almost as much as I did. It got a little obsessive, but it did help. I was literally dealing with grief. And I know that sounds silly to some people. 

Heather: It's not silly. 

Stacy: Art touches people in really deeply personal ways, so that means it has the power to hurt people in deeply personal ways too. There's something special about fandom when you see, oh my God, there's literally a thousand other people who are in the exact same boat as me who have been hurt in the exact same way as me, who are also desperately seeking people to talk to or vent with or grieve with. So often when you're grieving something, you're grieving on your own, or, if you're lucky, with a partner. The experience of collective grief is actually really important. 

Heather: Now that you're done with your story, do you feel like you did what you wanted to do? That you experienced and shared a kind of catharsis? 

Stacy: This sounds stupid, but I originally set out to convince my brain that Villanelle could be and is alive in that fictional world. But what I ended up doing was making myself feel really connected with Eve. So I didn't necessarily get the specific catharsis I was seeking from it at the start. It did give me a feeling of healing, just in a way I didn't expect. I've had some people ask me, oh, would you ever write a one-shot of them in the future traveling together or little dips into their life post-Saving Eve. And honestly, probably not? I feel like I told the story I wanted to tell, and I left them in the place I wanted to leave them. And that's a really good feeling. I'm not saying I think my story is perfect. There are things I wish I had done differently. 

Heather: That's just your personality. If you said you'd done anything perfectly, I'd know you'd been body-snatched. 

Stacy: I don't wanna sound full of myself, but yeah, I felt like I got them where I wanted to get them and I left them in the place I wanted to leave them and it felt like I earned that place. I didn't just throw them in the fucking Thames and shoot one of them. I really tried to earn my ending. And that process felt cathartic and good.

I still feel some grief about Villanelle that I wish I could have gotten rid of, that I just can't. Right. Um, but that's okay. That's just part of it.

Heather: I saw how deeply you cared about getting this story right, and how much you worried and agonized over so many decisions. And also how vulnerable you made yourself. I think writing fiction is the scariest thing. When I write, it's almost never fiction, so I know exactly what I'm saying and I know exactly how I'm portraying myself and the stories I'm talking about. But I think most times, with fiction, you're telling a story about the characters, a story you know you're telling, but you're also telling things about yourself that you often don't even know you're telling.

Stacy: Yeah, somebody left a comment on my last chapter that's directly tied to this and it made me feel really, um, perceived. I was a little uncomfortable!

Heather: No! Too perceived!

Stacy: But it ties in exactly with what you're saying, which is, there is a vulnerability to writing fiction. And like we've already talked about, there's a lot of you and I in this story, and even though Villanelle and Eve are such extreme characters — you know, we're not murdering people or knifing each other.

Heather: I'm too clumsy to be doing some knife play. 

Stacy: That's really true. We'd be in the emergency room so fast.

But yes, this is probably the most vulnerable I've felt in terms of art in a really long time. It's scary, but it's also rewarding. 

Heather: What's your favorite scene that you wrote? No, you can't do it. You can never pick your favorites. 

Stacy: I can tell you my favorite joke. 

Heather: Okay. Tell me your favorite joke.

Stacy: Well, it probably won't be funny out of context, but it's when Villanelle sees the way Yusuf acts with Eve, and she's thinking to herself, with no self awareness at all, "Wow, Eve has this clown completely wrapped around her finger. Can you even imagine?"

Heather: I certainly can't imagine being wrapped around the finger of the woman I love. Hem hem. Anyway, I am so proud of you, my love. 

Stacy: I couldn't have done it without you. 

Heather: You could have, but I was honored to stand alongside you while you made your beautiful art.