How to POWER THE FUTURE with Naomi Alderman

In 2017, Barack Obama named The Power as one of his favorite books of the year. And yet somehow, that’s not the biggest event in the author Naomi Alderman’s life.

Join us below for an exclusive chat with an author who shows no signs of stopping until she’s finished what she began.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

STEPHENIE: Take me back to the day you learned your first novel Disobedience would be published. What impact did that have on the path you were walking?

NAOMI: That was in July of 2005. I had just finished the novel, and my agent sent it out to publishers around London. She said to me, 'Don't expect to hear anything back for a month.'

That was a Friday. On 9:30 Monday morning, Penguin called with an offer for the book. At that point, I was working part-time for a charity.

I remember just like walking around the park, and every time I got back to the road to my apartment, I went around one more time. It felt like sunshine inside my head.

STEPHENIE: What was so intoxicating about selling your first book?

NAOMI: I don't think anybody who has not tried to write a novel can know how hard that first book is. You have to do it on self-belief—except in many cases, and probably and in my case, it was somewhat self-flagellation. I remember waking up most mornings and going, 'Come on, what have you done in your life if you haven't worked on this book? Get to work. Get to work.'

Also at one point, I called up my agent and said, 'Can you please send me an email to say what just happened?' So she did that, and I still have that email in my inbox.

STEPHENIE: In reviewing your total body of work, I was stunned at how many different people and organizations you've worked with. From video games to a Doctor Who novel to a zombie running app with viral popularity—and of course being mentored by, to borrow a Loki reference, 'She Who Will Not Be Named…'

What do your collaborations empower you to achieve that you couldn't do on your own?

NAOMI: I have several close collaborators with whom I’ve had an ongoing conversation over 10 or 20 years. Rebecca LaVine, my writing partner on the zombie running game, who was an editor of Doctor Who novels. Russell T Davies for my Doctor Who novel. We talk a lot and we send each other interesting things.

It's like having an extra brain. And it works both ways. [Rebecca] uses my brain, and I use her brain. It's part of a much bigger conversation. We're reinvestigating and rethinking about various things about the world.

And maybe I'm also a good collaborator. That is partly because number one, I spent a long time figuring out what parts of the Orthodox Jewish tradition I was going to keep. I'm still friends with my Orthodox Jewish family. You just kind of get used to the idea that we're not going to agree on everything, but we still love each other, and there's still much to talk about.

STEPHENIE: In what ways have you found worthiness through your limitations and differences?

NAOMI: There’s always going to be at least one really terrible review. That's how you know you're in the game. And that’s been a journey of the past 20 years for me to go, 'Oh, quite a lot of people are not going to like what I do. And that's fine.' I can be quite annoying. I can be a bit sanctimonious.

In part of the Jewish tradition, there's a concept of “an argument for the sake of Heaven.” Which means if you're arguing openly and sincerely about a subject that is important, that is a blessed thing. Heaven is pleased with you.

STEPHENIE: Let me ask you about Disobedience, and to a similar extent the movie adaptation. Really a stunning work.

Referring to your answers on your website’s FAQ, I felt quite moved by your explanation of how a person's entire paradigm shifts once puberty begins. Even for asexual people like myself—and I also have intersections with trans and intersex people—we still face physical changes. And more to the point, we must negotiate how we fit into a cultural paradigm based on how we are perceived by the people around us.

Further, I couldn't help but relate to your Guardian interview from 2020. You shared that in 2001, around the time of 9/11, you hadn’t yet written Disobedience, but you were in love with a man who then came out to you as gay. That sort of put you in the position of the husband in Disobedience.

How did these paradigm-shifting elements of sexuality inform your storytelling decisions in Disobedience and beyond?

NAOMI: A bunch of Orthodox Jewish people came out after 9/11. A lot of people wanted to live more authentically. For me, there was some urgent stuff I needed to work out.

STEPHENIE: Writing helped you work it out?

NAOMI: I came to the page every day ready to work through what was going on with me.

That has been my practice for somewhere between 20 and 25 years now. Writing is not therapy, but writing does a different job of metabolizing my life for me. Disobedience is made up, but even with the gender-swapped dynamic, I fancy girls. I've been in relationships with women.

And so in that sense, it's not a gender swap, because it's also about my experiences. I don't think I could have known then that I was writing myself out of Orthodox Judaism. Right at the end of the book, there's a realization that there's no obligation on you to live out all the things that you could be, but if you choose to, then you will experience more of yourself.

STEPHENIE: Did you meet any resistance to your concept for The Power? And if so, how did you cope with or negotiate those conflicts? And were those conflicts in a sense resurrected when it came time to adapt the book into a TV show?

NAOMI: Yeah, I did. In terms of bad reviews, there is a bad review out there of the novel, which I think was in The Spectator. And a quite well-respected feminist novelist hated [the book]. Just thought that I had written a book about how women are evil.

What I'm saying is yeah, we're all embroiled in this. “The patriarchy” is another way of saying 'we privilege the ability to do violence.'

STEPHENIE: Could you break down your concept of “the patriarchy” a little more?

NAOMI: This is annoying, but by the end of writing The Power, I thought, 'The pacifists are right.'

I still have some quibbles because you have to do something about Nazis. You can't just lie down and let them kill you. But at the same time, if we were to not accept that the ability to hit somebody very hard was a reason that you should ever do what they say—and if nobody were to accept that, then it would be over. That would just be all over.

There are some people for whom feminism means saying that women are better than men, and I don't agree with that. That is a conversation that is constantly surprising to some people who encounter the book. I don't want to get into saying who, but certainly it's a conversation that I've had to have from time to time on the TV show as well.

[And that conversation] is to go number one, women are not better than men. People say, 'Oh, but if we were led by women, wouldn't everything be kinder? Gentler?' And I go, 'I grew up in the UK under Margaret Thatcher.'

STEPHENIE: In a New York Times interview from 2018, you said that the bigger question for you isn't, 'How do you avoid being a victim?' It's how do you avoid being a Nazi.

NAOMI: My friend from the Netherlands says there's a saying: “Everybody would have been in the resistance.” Which is to say that we all believe that we would be in the resistance, but the evidence is no, most of us would roll over.

STEPHENIE: You made a couple of significant changes when adapting The Power into a series for Prime Video. One is that Margot starts off happily married instead of divorced.

What went into making such significant changes adapting the novel into [a] streaming series?

NAOMI: Listen, John Leguizamo gave an amazing performance. And he is incredibly adorable in that everybody wants to be married to him.

STEPHENIE: And he’s so clearly trans-allied from his earlier work [as Chi-Chi Rodriguez in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar].

NAOMI: Correct, he's a great guy. He was incredible on set. He gave a wonderful performance.

One of the conventions of TV is that you have a family you can relate to. This is a complicated, weird, interesting idea given that I don't come from a TV family. I don't have a TV family. And yet that's just the convention of TV. That’s how a lot of it is made, in the same way that the convention of a theater is that you have a premium arch, and the audience sits there, and then the play is back here.

The end result was that in the book she was divorced, and in the show, she's married, and that's how TV works.

STEPHENIE: You also made a powerful clarification that “the power” to manipulate electricity comes from sustained, elevated estrogen and the long-term impact that has on anyone’s body. Not just cisgender women's bodies. The power also goes to intersex people, trans people, a-gender people, [and] non-binary people.

What was it like pushing for those changes in the show? Did you face any pushback?

NAOMI: I was delighted to push for those changes.

My role in the world is to use my values to decide what I'm going to do, and I don't want a segment of my audience and readers to feel like there's no place for them in my work. And fundamentally, if you're going to give people [a] superpower, why not be generous?

These are some very thoughtful questions, and there’s a place for a thoughtful answer. It's not that it never occurred to me to put a trans character into the novel. When I was thinking about it, this would just be another way in which there would be prejudice. People would say, 'Your body is not the correct kind of body.'

I was very lucky in that I had some nice conversations on Twitter about this, which I know these days sounds mad. I'm delighted to have got it into the show. We have the wonderful trans actress Daniela Vega, who plays Sister Maria, and she gave a stunning performance.

STEPHENIE: Will we get a season two of The Power?

NAOMI: I don't know. There was that big writer strike, and there's still an actor strike, so nobody is rushing to recommission stuff until you could actually make a show. I would love to do another season. If not, it's been a really wonderful experience. It's great that it's out there, but disappointing if we don't get to finish the story. There's so much story left to tell.

Look, Margaret Atwood (her mentor when writing The Power) came back and wrote The Testament thirty years after The Handmaid’s Tale. Maybe I'll have what Margaret had, which is somebody who loved the book when they were a teenager then became powerful in TV, and then went and made the made the show.

STEPHENIE: Naomi, my last question, how would you like to be remembered?

NAOMI: It's interesting, we've just had a very sad, early death of Matthew Perry, who gave a really nice performance in Friends. But mostly, he seems like he was somebody who really tried to help, and that feels like a life well lived. If people can say that about you, that you really, honestly tried to help. And maybe you succeeded in helping.

STEPHENIE: I think so, too. In his memoir, he says that amidst everyone re-watching Friends, he hoped people would remember him as someone who helped others even when he couldn’t help himself.

NAOMI: That is the thing. Hopefully one or two of my ideas will end up being useful to the world, but that's not up to me. The meaning of our lives may not be known until long after we're gone. 

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Naomi Alderman's latest book The Future is available now!