On making room for monstrous female characters in fiction

Not quite a child, not yet subject to the rules of adulthood … It’s really a fairy tale conceit to be a teenage girl.” You are the definition of being caught in the in-between. And in the same token, you are at your most magical. “When you’re a teenage girl and when you’re with your friends, you are invincible, you are invulnerable, nothing can touch you. There were no boundaries between us … and it was kind of it was kind of like wearing one another’s identities. Nobody went to the bathroom by themselves. When I was a teenage girl, me and my best friends, we moved like a pack. “I never remember being quite as feral, quite as inhuman, as when I was a teenage girl. On the toxic yet magical power of being a teenage girl

And then the tension of growing up and essentially realizing that the other world is now closed to you.” Like in an age at which magic is not just a possibility, but it is real. It’s the desire to stay young enough, stay innocent enough, that fairyland and fairy world makes itself known to you. “Their relationship, in many ways, represents the tension of growing up. And that encapsulates one of the central relationships in the story, which is the friendship of Indigo and Azure. “When I think about fairy tales and myths and why we need them in the first place, it’s often because it’s seeking to explain the unexplainable. On the thematic importance of fairy tales

(Kalyani Saxena/Here & Now) Interview highlights Roshani Chokshi (left) with Kalyani Saxena (right).

The last flower bride