Michaela Coel is My Writing Hero - Andrew Crofts
I love it when a writer emerges
into the limelight and shows themselves to be entirely brilliant. Michaela Coel
– the author, co-director, producer and star of BBC series “I May Destroy You”, is my latest hero.
She is young enough to be one of my
children and her life experiences are as different to mine as it is possible to
be while still being born in the same country, (but only geographically). Listening
to her talk and watching her shows has taught me a great deal about worlds that
I have virtually no personal experience of. She has helped me understand how
other people feel.
Coel has had many of the most unpleasant
experiences of life thrust upon her and she writes and talks about them with
incredible power and humour. She appears to be entirely fearless in what she
says and who she says it to. She lays bare her experiences and her feelings and
those of people she knows and loves. The results are so truthful, so painful
and so watchable that it is not surprising that her work has been praised to
the skies by the critics.
One of the experiences that she talks
and writes about, is “being a writer”, and she nails the joys, the frustrations
and the agonies of the publishing profession as perfectly as she nails the
horrors of rape, racism, sexism and poverty.
Like I say, she’s my hero.
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