Sharon Horgan, Autofiction Auteur

Horgan spoke to me over Zoom from her London home, where she lives with her dog and a couple of “chatty” cats; in keeping with her autobiographical style, she filmed scenes from “Youth” nearby. We spoke about how she got the show green-lit despite never officially pitching it, about growing older with her series, and about how her approach to autofiction has shifted throughout her career. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.

How did “Youth” come about? I read that you went to HBO wanting to do something on the sandwich generation.

I don’t know that I pitched it, necessarily. I went in because we were looking for a deal for Merman, my production company. Casey [Bloys, the C.E.O. of HBO] said, “What are you thinking about at the moment? What are you working on?” I did talk about the sandwich generation, and I talked about a woman at this stage in her life—my stage. I might have mentioned a shit date I’d been on or another relationship that had ended, and I was talking about how hard it was to find yourself at a time when your kids are leaving home and you have time to focus on you, and then everything just falls apart. You realize time is ticking, but you seem to have less time than ever.

It’s a really stressful time. People are dying all around you, and you have to get on with things. And now we have to look after our kids for much longer, well into their twenties and beyond. I just said a few lines about that, and then he contacted my agent and said, “I think I know exactly what this is, so let’s do it.” And I’ve never had that experience before. It’s not how TV works, normally. It’s a lot of rigmarole, so it was kind of mad that that happened.

Did that make you feel more confident about making the show?

Yes and no, because [initially] there wasn’t anything there, really. I just knew that I wanted to write about this particular woman, and I wanted her to have one of those careers that women seem to be really good at, but also put way too much into. We work around the clock, into the night. Agenting, where you have to be a mother to so many people outside of your own children, felt like a good high-pressure job to put her into, and, the more I discovered about the literary world, the more I thought, Oh, this is singular.

Your budgets have gotten bigger since your first show, “Pulling,” which débuted in 2006, and you’ve become a bigger name. Given where you are in your career, have your visual ambitions for your shows changed as well?

That’s a good question. I suppose yes. The thing is, when you start out making anything, you have huge ambition. So, potentially, the first version of “Pulling” would have had everything on the page. And then you deliver it to the producer, and they go, None of that’s possible, and then you go, O.K., and you pare it back.

“We’re cutting this trip to China.”

Or, like, You can’t have a party [scene] because we’ve got three extras. “Divorce” [on HBO] had a big budget, certainly compared to what I was used to—that was a beautiful, ambitious show. But most of what I’ve done in the U.K. has had much smaller budgets. With this, I guess, I could have a bit more fun, with the literary world and beyond.

For years, actors have asked me to write an episode of something that’s set somewhere hot. This is very reductive, but a lot of the time they want to be somewhere nice and warm and film somewhere beautiful. And I’ve never been able to do that, so [for “Youth”] getting to re-create Ibiza and film in Frankfurt and even re-creating the book fair, all of that was fun.

Your character has that beautiful apartment. I haven’t been that jealous of an apartment in quite a while.

We found the exterior first. It’s this beautiful block in North East London. Then our amazing designer re-created the interior in the studio. It’s funny, because when I went onto the set the first time, I was, like, This is too big. So we kind of chopped it. We were pushing walls together. It was ridiculous, because you want to have the freedom to film, to move around and use the lenses you want to use to create something that feels filmic. But in the end we ended up in a place where we thought, Well, it’s a lovely two-bedroom. Let’s just say she bought it when the East End was cheap, which it was, about twenty years ago.