CCChat_The-Jess-Hill-Interview

A conversation with Jess Hill
M: See What You Made Me Do,
what made you write that?
J : That’s a very big question. I’m
probably only just starting to
understand that myself. When I
started writing it, I don’t think I
had many personal connections
with anyone who had been badly
abused, I certainly didn’t think I
had any family history of it.
What I’ve done my whole life,
even going back to when I was a
kid, is try to reveal concealed
truths, and I think I was doing
that within my family, as well as
wanting to do it in society. When
I was doing homework
assignments, I was trying to find
out the thing that teachers
weren’t telling us.
It came to me that, when I
started working on domestic
abuse and then the family court
and other associated systems,
this is one of the greatest
concealed truths in the world.
Not only concealed to the public,
but, weirdly, also concealed to
the people who had experienced
it, because, as you know,
domestic abuse and, in
particular, coercive control, robs
people of their words, to describe
what’s happening to them, and it
makes it very difficult to both
explain it to themselves, to
unravel what they’ve been wound
up in, so they can come back to a
sense of self, but also so that they
can explain to people what
happened to them and why they
made certain choices.
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