Wicked Good
Wicked Good
Munchkinland, peeing on the floor, putting down her nose to smell it, and then smiling at the smell of her own pee. I meant this to seem feral and animal-like, broken and incorrect. That was my intention when I wrote that paragraph, and then I went to bed.
Next day, I got up, got my coffee, sat down at my notebook and reread the last page or two of what I’ d written the day before. I write in chronological order and build on what has come the page before— and the 100 pages before. I read that paragraph about the girl being so ferocious and so unlovely, and instead of finding the next scene in which I could make her unlovelier still, my heart broke. I read it like a reader, and I said to myself,“ Oh, my gosh. Oh Elfie, nobody is ever going to get you, are they? And that’ s your life. Not the life that I thought I was going to harness you, sabotage you, and enslave you into. You have a
different life, and it’ s not the one I thought I’ d be writing. My job is now to put aside my ambitions and do something that is going to seem much more traditional and even obvious. I’ m just going to follow you in your life with my reporter’ s notebook and write down what I see. I’ m not going to force you to play a role for my intellectual psychodrama. I’ m going to try to let you be yourself and just be a responsible witness.”
Some people will call it the rehabilitation of a villain, which is not exactly what I wanted. I wanted the humanization of the villain, which is not the same thing. She does lots of bad things. She’ s impatient, she’ s testy, and she’ s morally uncertain many times in my novel, but she’ s still human. She has the capacity for guilt, for remorse, and for confusion; for love and passion, courage and insight, vision and power. She’ s got everything that I could see in myself and that I can see in others. She led me through the whole plot. All
I had to do was follow. It was really an easy job once I got going.
Megan: Were you surprised by the reaction to it?
Gregory: I had just gotten an agent, and he thought it was a great idea. He said,“ We’ re going to be able to sell this, and it’ s going to do well for the first selling season, I think, and then it will subside, but it will be a permanent slow burner for many years, maybe even a couple of decades. It’ s not going to be a big seller, but I’ m willing to pedal it for you.” By the time the Broadway play was about to open, it had sold close to a million copies without Broadway behind it. So that was a big surprise to him, to my editors, and to me. Then Broadway happened and it went stratospheric.
Megan: And how did the Broadway show come to be?
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