What inspired you to write falling? I'm curious how the idea came to you. Like how did you decide to make Leela a scientist?
Hellooooo, so nice to hear from you again, baby! 🤍 Omigosh, I love you so so much! How sweet of you to ask something I wanted to address myself! 🦋🫶
CW: depression, SA, trauma, character study.
In general, the story of Falling came to me during the long drought between TLOUS1 and S2. I was rewatching gameplays on YouTube from TLOU2, thinking—as always—about Joel Miller. And it struck me: this poor, agonising old man has never truly known peace. Not for a single day. Think about it. No, really. Every choice he’s made, every burden he’s carried, after every lie spoken—he's never had rest, even during those 5 years in the Jackson community. He's been running after something, seeking something, trying to make sense of something, repairing a relationship. That realisation stayed with me.
So I started building a story around that. With folklore and evermore by Taylor Swift (!!!!) playing on repeat, I began to see the shape of it: a big, white house. A quiet place—suspended in memory. Two people. The rhythm of Jackson in the background. A world broken, a world remains. And peace, not as something handed down by fate, but made. Chosen. Earned. Joel’s path, with all its violence and sorrow, still led him to a resting heart.
Then came Leela. Wow, Leela.... goddamn.
She began as a concept—someone utterly unlike Joel, and yet, somehow, his mirror. I needed that. Intellectually sharp, emotionally withheld. A STEM-focused mind, much like mine sometimes. I envisioned her as this tortured genius—a lot of similarities to Tony Stark here—but Leela refused to remain a sentiment. She deepened, darkened, unfolded right out of my page. She revealed parts of herself I hadn’t planned—became more vulnerable with depth, grief and fury, and more human than I ever anticipated.
Other than her being a person of colour and her quest for legacy, her postnatal depression, her sexual assault—these were experiences I knew I had to urgently explore with her. There are NOT NARRATIVE DEVICES; these were truths I needed to give space to. They’re so often dismissed, authored poorly, sexualized, treated like footnotes in a person’s life, or hidden away, as if they’re things people are simply “get over,” endured silently, overcome privately, forgotten conveniently. Pain that’s meant to fade as time or their child unfolds. Trauma that is just expected to resolve 'off-screen.'
But they don’t. It is fucking real, it is evil. It does not work that way.
Not without acknowledgement. Not without compassion, gentleness. Not without someone witnessing the cost.
Too many people, too many young women, too many mothers—are left to suffer in the aftermath of violence, their pain dismissed or pathologised, and sometimes their worlds are collapsed into the care of one small, fragile, helpless person, while they are breaking themselves. Questions came to me. How do you nurture love when your body remembers only pain before anything else? How do you love through that? How do you differentiate between instinctive love and the hollow ache that shadows it?
And that's where Leela lay. In that brutal space between survival and surrender.
And that’s also where Maya began to matter.
Maya wasn’t born to soften the story, or again, another plot device—she became the story’s heart. Her existence was never meant to redeem Leela’s trauma, but to stand by it. A child born of violence, yes—but also of staggering strength. And as Joel entered the story... you can see facets of them change. It doesn't come with seasons; it matures with our baby girl.
Maya grew as Joel grew. Joel, who had only ever known love through loss, is now asked to love through presence, patience, and the constant, customary empathy that doesn’t come naturally to him. And bright little Maya loved him without question. She reflected his roughness back with joy. In her, Joel found a second chance not to erase his past, but to live alongside it. That part was really important to me.
And Leela, in watching Joel choose Maya over and over, loving a child she'd struggled from the beginning to mother, she learned to prevail. To trust. To begin again, not as a person healed, but as a person healing—with both of them.
In some ways, Leela became this big vessel for all the things I’ve personally felt: the emptiness that creeps in when you’re not being “productive,” the frantic anxiety beneath stillness, the ache of surviving when surviving doesn’t feel like living.
This story was also, in so many weird ways, my way of confronting my own fears about motherhood. Not the pastel, sunshine-and-lollipops version—but the real thing. The terrifying thing. The blood, the gore, the pain, the misconceptions. The thought that one day I might be handed something as overwhelming, as painful, as complex as this, like many other people before me—mommy blues, identity loss, rage, isolation. That I might love a child more than anything and still not feel okay. That I might not recognise myself in the mirror. That I might fucking fail. And I would not know what to do.
Writing Falling gave me language for these current and future fears.
And for these huge questions I didn’t know how to voice out: What if I can’t bond with my baby? What if I feel trapped? What if I don’t feel maternal at all? What if my future husband isn't going to understand? What if he's somehow, in a really evil way, better than me? What if people despise me for not behaving a certain way or following the norm with my child?
And Joel, in his quiet, stumbling way, became my answer. In choosing to stay. In loving without demanding. In witnessing, being present, without solving. And Maya, through this, became hope. She doesn’t need her mother to be whole. She loves in that unconditional way children do—without needing answers or fear. They just love.
In writing this, I came to understand that motherhood doesn’t have to look graceful. It can be uncertain, angry, flawed—and still be perfect love. And what the hell—I'm still learning. I don't know the first thing.
What do you think about 'Falling' and its topics? Wonderful mothers, fathers, parents—has it been addressed the way you'd like it to? Have I missed something? Let's talk about it!
(oh so many Taylor Swift references, I fear she's taken over me entirely)
