Millennial falcon

Creator of drama-comedy ‘Can’t Cope Won’t Cope’, screenwriter Stefanie Preissner is on a roll with a new show in the works, a movie in development, and she has bared all in her new memoir. She talks exclusively to Sophie White about slaying the snowflake

‘I have definitely suffered more trauma at the hands of female friendships then I have from any man. Women are so clever and so capable of the greatest generosities and the greatest atrocities.” Stefanie Preissner is recounting how she came to be cyber-bullied at 26 by a gang of former school friends who froze her out for being too “stressful” and set up a Whatsapp to deliberately exclude her. Writing about your former bullies in a memoir in a small place like Ireland, where everyone relentlessly tracks each other, sounds like a terrible idea, but Preissner is unequivocal.

“I don’t think that they would be particularly shocked,” she says. “We were a group of girls — it was extremely dramatic. We were all involved in the drama.”

Surreally for Preissner, because she was home in Mallow at the time, the fallout played out in her teenage bedroom. “I was thinking, ‘This is horrific.’ I remembered the feelings of being in school, when no one was talking to you and you’re aware of how inconsequential and yet all-consuming it is. It’s a devastating place to be.”

“I could easily understand how a young brain could think, my whole world is ending, there is no one, there is nothing else, I’m done — and it was a really scary insight,” Preissner says.

This episode is just one of the formative events chronicled with tenderness and much wit in her memoir,

Why Can’t Everything Just Stay The Same? It is a collection of personal essays that charts her childhood in Mallow; life as a PE-dodging teenager; the traumatic move to Dublin in her early 20s that inspired her hit one-woman show Solpadeine is my Boyfriend, and her frankly meteoric rise in the two years since her acclaimed TV show Can’t

Cope Won’t Cope hit screens. Change is something Preissner does not handle well and yet, along with weathering much personal upheaval, she has also changed radically herself.

“I don’t do fickle friendships based on weekend plans,” she says, “but when I was younger there were definitely people I’d never met sober; I had never met outside of an eating activity. I don’t have those friendships anymore.”

One of the biggest changes was to give up sugar two years ago and take up kickboxing. Having been overweight most of her life, the change in Preissner’s appearance has been a strange journey. In a way, she says, it has made her far less confident in herself because it has been an uncomfortable uncovering of just how fickle the world is. At one point we discuss the time of Solpadeine and she quips: “Back when I was invisible”.

It’s a topic that Preissner hates to discuss. Her loathing for the topic is quite visceral. She, rightly, rails: “I am the only woman in the country to have a TV show with two strong female characters she created and wrote. Why are we talking about my body?” But to entirely ignore the ramifications of her appearance, of being a hot young woman in the public eye, is to ignore the toxic culture women are forced to engage with in order to be heard.

Economy of attractiveness

“First of all, I don’t feel hot,” Preissner is clearly discomfited. “But that’s beside the point. It makes me sad. It makes me anxious, this economy of attractiveness. If that’s my currency, then it’s not going to mature well. That’s investing in bad shares because it can only go one way, right?”

When I ask if she feels burdened by it, there is a long pause as Preissner considers.

“Burdened by it? No. A little bit icky? Yes. I feel that also I’m aware of it so I can use it. I never feel good when I use it. I struggled with a magazine cover that I did. I would go into Centra and see myself and think, ‘Oh God! What am I doing? I’m buying rice cakes in a tracksuit and there I am! Wow I look great!’ Because I spent two-and-ahalf hours in make-up and your man is an amazing photographer. That dress cost four grand, like.

“People don’t look like that. I’m just perpetuating something that I hate but also I get to do that now. It’s so fucking complex. Is it a case of Harvey Norman? Once they’re gone, they’re gone! So get those sofas while they’re still on sale,” she finishes with a rueful laugh.

“Do you want to put me on the cover because that’ll sell more magazines or do you actually want to hear what I have to say?” she wonders. For Preissner, to interact with the system is really the only option. It is accepting that purity of beliefs is futile if no one can hear your message, so she plays the game but always with a wry gaze, posting blooper shots from magazine shoots on her Instagram and generally not buying into the bullshit.

“The world is shallow and it’s not just men. Actually very rarely, it’s men. Men aren’t buying those magazines. They’re not created and constructed by men.”

“It’s extremely hard. Navigating the world as a woman now is like playing a game of Operation. I’m going to hit off something now, it’s going to buzz and I’m going to have my fucking liver plucked out!”

“There’s a band of feminists out there that I’m terrified of. I’m scared that I’m not wearing the right jumper; I’m not saying the right things; I’m not eating the right food. I like the feeling when my legs are shaved. Am I allowed to wear make-up? Or should I feel the heavy weight of the patriarchy on my eyelids? Surely feminism is about letting me do whatever the fuck I want? It’s come back into the fucking Whatsapp bitches. ‘Well if you want to be part of our gang...’” she adopts a priggish voice. “What? Can my uterus not just make me be part of your gang? Also, why do we have to be in gangs? It’s fucked up.”

“Everyone is just primed for offence now,” Preissner is emphatic. “It’s exhausting. I just want to be sound. Can we just understand that we’re all trying? Maybe I don’t want to shave my legs, maybe I do. Maybe they’re my legs. Maybe I can do what I want with my body and it’s no reflection on what you do with yours.”

“It makes me so uncomfortable,” she concludes, “the torture we put people under to abide. Just play along, just be good, just be inoffensive and play by the rules.”

As Stefanie Preissner knows only too well, being vocal and a woman is a volatile position.