Interview: Taking a Page From Bekah Brunstetter’s Notebook

Bekah Brunstetter is an accomplished writer of television and theater. She penned the book for The Notebook, currently running on Broadway, but you may know her from her work on the TV hit show This Is Us. Brunstetter has the talent and the confidence that has fuelled her success, and has an outlook that ensures she stays true to her values and lets nothing stand in her way.  Listen up, ladies: we should all take a page out of Brunstetter’s “book.”

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

I saw The Notebook and it was not at all what I expected. I found it very moving, and I saw myself in each of the characters, but then I saw someone I knew in each of the characters. It’s a story about aging and how relationships change over time.
You’re making my heart so happy right now because what you’re saying is exactly our intention. From the beginning, we wanted to focus on the older characters a little bit more than the movie and the book and look at everything through the lens of these two people who were at the end of their lives.

The movie kind of does this, but the older characters are in service of the younger characters. We focused on the older characters, and it felt very important to us to do that because every movie, every musical is about the hot young people, and we dared to give them a little less real estate and weight. But we also wanted everyone to see themselves in every character. It’s almost like a meditation on time and aging and life and love.  

How did you build the confidence to want to go forward in this profession? Succeeding as a writer is challenging in the best of times.
When I was like five years old I said to my parents, “I’m a writer,” and I’ve been writing ever since then. I never wanted to do anything else but write and I’ve been writing since I could hold a pen. My parents never said, “will you please do something else?” Their confidence kept me going. The fact that they never questioned me is one of the things that kept me going.  

How hard is it to make it as a woman as a writer in film and television?
I have three brothers and I was never made to feel like I was any different from them or that I needed to apologize because I was a girl. I have found myself in a lot of male spaces throughout my career and I’ve never felt uncomfortable in them or like I didn’t belong. I may have shielded myself from some negative experiences, also; my first real staff job on the TV side of things was with a show created by a woman and there were mostly female writers in the room. The Notebook is full of women, which is amazing and rare. I think if you’re living your values, you’ll find the right spaces and I found myself with this one. 

I have women who came before me to thank for that, the women who were sitting in comedy rooms listening to the 10 millionth dick joke and not saying anything because she felt like if she said anything, she’d lose her job. That’s not lost on me. But from my experience over the last 10 years or so in the industry, it’s been mostly positive.  

What about in the theater world?
I think it’s a great time for women. Look at the season. It’s been so inspiring. There’s just a lot of support for each other. Women know how to take care of each other and support each other. Now that you’ve got all these women reaching these leadership positions, that’s only going to trickle down. So now is a great fucking time to feel confident. 

What advice would you give to a young woman who might be starting out in the creative field or the writing field who constantly feels the imposter syndrome? 
Fuck that imposter syndrome. Bury it. You’re a writer, you’re a person. You belong here just as much as anyone else. Writing is hard enough.   

I acknowledge that that is easy for me to say because of my experience. But that’s just truly how I’ve always felt. In my TV career, I once had a male show runner say to me, “we hired you because we needed a girl” and while I was grateful to have the job, it just kind of slapped me in the face. But I took the job and I used it to build and get to other opportunities. And now I’m going to create shows that give opportunities to other women.