Sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued and very funny, Sharon Horgan is about to seduce America with her tragicomic take on a divorce from hell, starring Sarah Jessica Parker. By Eva Wiseman
One evening in 2014, Sharon Horgan met Sarah Jessica Parker for dinner. After making her name in a show about sex and thankless dating, Parker wanted to make a programme about grown-up relationships she was a fan of Horgans Pulling, and the two had started tentative talks about working together on a show about a long and painful divorce. They ordered food. Horgan was overdressed and far from home.
Born in 1970, she grew up on a turkey farm in County Meath. At 19 she moved to London, where she lives today with her property-developer husband and two daughters (Sadhbh is 12 and Amer seven) on the edge of an east-London common that, on warm days, smells sweetly of marijuana.
In the restaurant, Horgan and Parker talked about their children (Parker has two daughters and a son) and how it felt to be away from them. They talked about the stress of fitting filming in around school schedules, and the questions people ask, and the expectations strangers have of the guilt a working mother is meant to feel and then the guilt inspired by those expectations.
Hours later we looked up and realised, Horgan says, that wed spent the whole meal talking about the the qualifying we had to do before we could even get to the work, things that a man would never even consider. A man, at a meeting about a TV show, would surely have just been looking straight ahead, into the future.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/global/2016/oct/09/sharon-horgan-queen-of-difficult-women