She fancies herself a voice of her generation - a belief reinforced by all the fans who recognize her in her travels and insist Chronicles felt like she was speaking for them - but she’s a champion procrastinator who will seemingly do anything to avoid the computer cursor blinking accusatorily at her. Later, we’ll learn that she entered the publishing world through the side door, leveraging her Twitter following into a book, Chronicles of a Fed-Up Millennial, which she self-published as a PDF. She has a draft due to the publisher Susy Henny (Franc Ashman) - as her exasperated but polite-to-a-fault agents Julian (Adam James) and Francine (Natalie Walter) keep reminding her - and has barely written anything. Maybe because I May Destroy You is as much about the creative process - or, specifically, about writer’s block - as it is about assault and its many other weighty subjects.Īrabella is in Italy in the first episode allegedly to complete work on the first draft of her new book, but really she’s just there to hang out with her drug dealer boyfriend Biagio (Marouane Zotti). But also, the deeper in I got, the more obvious it became that Coel’s much less interested in clarifying exactly what’s happening than she is in showing you how these confounding events make Arabella feel.Īs any good writer - and Coel (who wrote every episode and co-directed most of them with Sam Miller) is one hell of a writer - knows, where you choose to begin your story can say a lot about what kind of story you’re telling. So while a colleague reviewed the show prior to premiere, I waited until the season was close to done so I could watch it on HBO with the captions on, and everything was almost instantly clearer. Eventually, I decided that the show’s extreme Britishness was too much of a barrier for me without subtitles.
(*) I watched screeners of the first four episodes months ago, simultaneously aware that Coel was doing something really compelling and that I was having one hell of a time following much of what was happening. Part of this process involves covering the walls of her bedroom with index cards depicting different beats of the story. In the penultimate episode, Arabella - with help from, of all people, Zain (Karan Gill), a fellow writer who previously had unprotected sex with Arabella without her consent, then tried to gaslight her about it - tries a different, more structured approach to finishing the novel she has struggled with all season. The show plays around with time and memory, and in hindsight, that opening shot takes place close to the end of the story, even though it’s the first thing we see.
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The series is deliberately confounding in its early chapters(*), the better to capture the sense of disorientation that Arabella feels both on the night she is drugged and raped, and over the ensuing weeks and months, as she realizes what happened to her and struggles with how to live with that knowledge. I admit that I did, and was surprised to see it when I looped back around to the premiere shortly after finishing the show’s remarkable finale. Presented so briefly, and out of context, at the start of a sad, funny, narratively intricate story about consent, sexual assault, and coping with trauma, it’s an easy image to forget. The premiere lingers on this image for only a few seconds before jumping to Italy to meet our heroine, social-media star turned novelist Arabella ( Chewing Gum star Coel). We are in a small, cluttered bedroom, the bedspread filled with notepads, pens, and scraps of paper, the walls covered with index cards. The very first shot of I May Destroy You occurs, like much of Michaela Coel’s incredible HBO limited series, outside the boundaries of time, and possibly reality.
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This column contains full spoilers for HBO’s I May Destroy You, which aired its finale on Monday night.
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