We’d been together for 12 years, and I felt just like my life and world was so wrapped up with him … it felt like starting over from square one. You’re like, “I hate my family.” I love that.Ĭan you tell me a bit about where you were in your life when you started writing the novel, where the idea came from?Īlissa Nutting:I was pregnant, but I also knew I had to get a divorce, and that was scary. I got on Zoom with both of them to talk about the process of turning such a uniquely weird book into an equally weird TV show, how the show changed over the course of the pandemic, and why sex doll Diane’s “look of slight dissatisfaction” is so familiar.Īlissa, I love this book so much that I gave it to everyone in my family for Christmas a few years ago. Nutting, who wrote the story in the midst of her own panicked escape from a marriage, co-adapted Made for Love along with showrunner Christina Lee, who fell as deeply in love with the novel as I did. (The book involves an entire secondary plot revolving around a man who falls in love with a dolphin, but that’s been scrapped from the series - at least for the time being.
Somehow, things only get stranger from there, as Hazel tries to figure out how to extract Byron from her brain while regaining any sort of agency over her own life and eating breakfast opposite Diane. When the increasingly miserable Hazel realizes Byron has begun merging their brains so that they might be able to permanently read each other’s thoughts, she panics and escapes, running home to her estranged father Herbert (Ray Romano), who’s in the throes of a new relationship with a sex doll named Diane. Hazel and Byron wed instantaneously and spend the next decade safely and claustrophobically ensconced inside The Hub, a hermetically sealed bubble that’s made to mimic the outside world, minus its smells. Premiering today, the series follows Hazel Green (an incredible Cristin Milioti), a scrappy amateur scam artist who gets seduced over the course of a single evening by an Elon Musk–ian tech billionaire named Byron Gogol (Billy Magnussen). When I learned that HBO Max would be adapting the novel, I was apprehensive: Would the show be able to capture the book’s maniacal humor, its oddly poetic horniness, its gorgeous sense of impending doom? Four episodes in, I’d say - cautiously - yes.
As similarly demonstrated in her unhinged Grub Street diets, Nutting has a perfectly twisted way with words, a darkly hilarious and refreshingly frank way of looking at and sending up the increasingly uncanny world we inhabit. I returned to it several times over the years, mostly to try and figure out how she pulled off its freaky magic tricks. I first read Alissa Nutting’s 2017 absurdist sci-fi-satire Made for Love on an airplane, laughing out loud so many times that my seatmates began to suspect me of insanity.
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