GIRLFRIENDS’ GUIDE TO DIVORCE: Marti Noxon’s Best TCA Stories

GIRLFRIENDS’ GUIDE TO DIVORCE creator Marti Noxon is a TV vet — some of the show’s she’s written for: BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, GLEE, and PRIVATE PRACTICE — but what might be slightly lesser known is that she’s also wickedly funny.

Her humor was on full display during Bravo’s GIRLFRIENDS’ GUIDE TO DIVORCE Television Critics Association press tour panel on Monday, as she shared stories about Carrie Fisher, her own post-divorce sex life, and more…

• On the show’s semi-similarity to her real-life: “Well, I just told the room before we came on stage that as we were driving over here, I got a text from my business manager that today I paid my last alimony payment. So that felt like some kind of good sign. Five years ago my marriage split up, but this show is about so much more than that for me. And it’s not about my divorce. It’s about divorces, and none of it is autobiographical, but I was so inspired by the experience, but also I had been wanting for a long time to write about sexual politics, about what’s going on between men and women right now in relationships, especially when the balance of power is sometimes it’s new for people when a woman earns a lot more than a man or when her business is more when she gets more attention for being in the world. We’re all trying to figure out how to navigate so many new things. “
• On The CW series they created specifically for the series (Paul Adelstein’s on-screen girlfriend is a CW star): “The CW show that we’ve created for her to be on is called BLOOD SISTERS. She’s both the vampire slayer she plays twin sisters, and one is a vampire slayer and one is a vampire.”
• On GIRLFRIENDS’ GUIDE guest star Carrie Fisher: “She plays Abby’s long time book editor and sort of she’s been her career guide since she started writing these books, and no, we didn’t know that she was about to go do STAR WARS, and because of that, she’s in England [now], so we had to work her story that she actually goes away for a while. But apparently she’s lost a lot of weight, and I’m like, ‘When she comes back, we’ll say she was in rehab!’…The funny thing is that she was very quiet when she first came. We really had no idea what we were going to get, and I think she would feel fine about me saying that, that we had no idea what we were going to get. She showed up on the morning. She knew every single line. She killed it. Like, four takes. She was done…She leaves, and as she’s leaving, she goes, ‘You guys are lucky it’s a manic day.'”
• On the show’s wacky events…that are actually based in reality: “The truth is, I just try to be truthful, and half the stuff that’s in the show has either happened to me or other people. In episode 3, Abby gets eight of her fingers stuck in between two panels of a window that crashes on her hands, and it seems a little crazy, and she’s in her underpants…However, that happened to me when I was alone, essentially, in the house, and I had eight of my fingers stuck in a window in my nightie, and there was nobody there to rescue me. And at the same time, I was sort of like, ‘Oh, my God. I live by myself now and these are my fingers. I’m a writer. Oh, my God!’ We ended up having to call the paramedics. I screamed until somebody came and helped me.”
• On sex post-marriage: “There’s a moment in the pilot that I’m personally very proud of, because I really stuck it out there. When Abby has sex for the first time out of her marriage, and the first time I had relations out of my marriage, I was very anxious and nervous, of course, and the guy just went, ‘Balls!’ I was like, ‘What?’ He’s like, ‘Touch them!’ I was like, ‘Okay. I didn’t know that was a thing now.’ I had no idea. So super awkward, and I did say my ex-husband’s name twice, so it was great. Really fantastic. But you have a much better experience in the pilot than that.
• On her real-life friends: “I do have to say that the story about a woman who was being paid by her ex to continue to sleep with him [which happens in the series] is true. I had a friend, and we had some long night, and we were hanging out on her couch, and she gets a phone call, and she says, ‘I’m actually sitting here with a friend of mine. No, she’s cute. Kind of cheerleader. I don’t know. Blonde. Uh huh, uh huh.’ And she puts her hand over the phone, ‘Do you want to have sex with me and my ex-husband? He’s really turned on, and he’s been kind of we have an arrangement.’ [Laughs] I swear to God. This happened to me, and I couldn’t even process it, but then I got to write about it, and the sex was great by the way.”
• On her time at MAD MEN: “Oh, my gosh. It changed my life in so many ways, because I had been working only in network, and it just wasn’t a good fit for me. That’s all I can say about that. After the experience of working on BUFFY where we kind of I didn’t realize until I left that show that you weren’t allowed to write what you wanted to write all the time. A lot of networks have a lot of thoughts about and there’s also restricting in a way, because I like to go blue, as you can see, but among other things, I really like things to develop at their own rate and not necessarily force too much story. So I went to I’ll never forget going to MAD MEN, and first or second day I said, ‘What’s the theme? What’s the theme we’re working on here?’ And [MAD MEN creator] Matt [Winer] turned to me, and he said, ‘Screw theme. Where did you learn that? Unlearn that.’ So it was like going to writing school again. He’s a genius. He’s a wild man. You know, there was more drama in the writers’ room than there was on set all the time. The season I was there were all female writers, so you can imagine. Every day it was like ha-ha, laugh, tears, cry, run to the bathroom, and that was just Matt.”

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Amazing, right?

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