Sharon Horgan’s new HBO comedy, Youth, follows Alex — a fiftysomething London literary agent whose son comes home after his first week at college. In an interview with Inkoo Kang, Horgan (creator of Pulling, Catastrophe, Bad Sisters) talks about the sandwich generation, menopause, midlife romance, and the working method she only recently learned a word for: autofiction.

What she describes is essentially a serialized autobiography, one show per life stage:

  • Pulling (2006): the unsettled late twenties, “life moving at a rate of knots,” unsatisfying relationships, no career yet
  • Catastrophe: married with small children, an accidental pregnancy turned rushed marriage (based on her own)
  • Motherland: the school-gate network of women you barely know and suddenly live inside
  • Youth: the step after — kids gone, parents ailing, time “ticking” while somehow feeling shorter than ever

She wrote a mother and son rather than a mother and daughter on purpose. “The thing about writing about the girls is, that’s their story.” The teenage son, Ruari, is her first major character who is not hyper-verbose — a deliberate risk she underwrote with younger men in the writers’ room and a WhatsApp group tracking what he watches.

A few other things worth keeping:

  • Youth was greenlit without a real pitch. She mentioned the sandwich generation while talking to HBO’s Casey Bloys about a deal for her production company; he called her agent and said “let’s do it.” “It’s not how TV works, normally.”
  • She chose agenting for Alex because it is “one of those careers that women seem to be really good at, but also put way too much into” — round-the-clock mothering of other people’s projects.
  • On aging onscreen: “I love aging onscreen. No, I don’t; it’s horrible. But it just makes sense.”
  • Clothes carry character. Catastrophe’s Sharon bought designer pieces only on sale, which is why everything was mismatched. Alex still wears miniskirts, because she “is not prepared to go quietly into the dark night.”

The quiet subject of the interview is a kind of labor that rarely gets named as such: writing that is also care work, a career assembled out of the lives of the people around you, financed by the phone time Horgan is half-ashamed of. “I really want to educate myself; I want to watch Gloria Steinem reels. I don’t always want to watch face-lift videos. But both are in my life.”

Her ethics of writing from life have moved in one direction only — ruthless at the start, guilty once her children were being teased at school, freer now that they’re grown and the story, as she puts it, is no longer hers to spend.