Writer Jane Upton reflects on the ideas and feelings that helped shape her powerful Bruntwood Prize shortlisted play

I viscerally remember lying on a hot Cornish beach in August 1995 with a deep aching in my belly. I was 15 and I had More! magazine open at Position of the Fortnight. I was wondering if I would ever get to try it out. The problem was, the man in the explicit line drawing was holding the woman in his arms and I was way too fat for that. 

The 1990s was the age of heroin chic, Kate Moss and magazines that told you how to please men. It was a time where women were expected to be laddish but sexy as hell – up for it at all times but also demure enough to be attractive. Women had to be pretty and thin and sexy enough to pull off a Wonderbra and a Rachel cut. You had to be able to down a pint without smudging your lipstick or belching afterwards. It was a tricky balance to strike and one that formed my neural pathways.

Sex shaming was the norm – we all knew that promiscuous girls were slags but lads were legends. Ginger Spice was the “fat one”, even though she was actually about a size 8. And mothers were old, frumpy, nurturing, selfless and sitting in the back seat of life. Except Eddie from Ab Fab and obviously she was jokes.

An audience profile for More!, said: “The more! reader is either studying at university/ college or in the early stages of her career, but she’s more interested in finding the man of her dreams and living happily ever after! She’s either single and looking for a relationship, or has a boyfriend and wants to know how to keep him. She loves hitting the shops to track down the latest high street bargains and going out on a Saturday night having fun.”

I lived my life as if they were the rules. I even quit uni after one term because I’d met a boy back home and missed him. I treated sex as a way to attract and keep a man – always performative and never about me. I hated my body and it’s taken me the whole of adulthood to come close to accepting it. Once I’d been with a boy for a while, I didn’t know what sex was supposed to look like. Inevitably we both got bored and started the cycle elsewhere.

I carried all these feelings into adult relationships and even marriage. My 40s and motherhood have been about unpicking those formative experiences and trying to understand who I really want to be.

That’s why I wrote (the) Woman. As a writer I hear a lot of opinions on how women should be portrayed in plays and films. Words like strong, tough, sassy and kick ass get bandied about. But I was flailing in early motherhood, burned by my earlier experiences and wondering how the hell I was supposed to unpick myself out of this messy version of girlhood and womanhood to write better versions of women. I felt short changed. Like no one had told me how to handle this transition. 

I felt ugly and smelly and in service to young children, but I still felt my currency was in being sexy and attractive and up for it and funny. I needed to write something that unpicked all that. 

For more on (the) Woman by Jane Upton click here