katie boland: writer
As a screenwriter, Boland has a prolific slate of television projects in development. Boland is often hired by networks to write what she is directing. She is currently packaging her next two original feature films.
Her first foray into screenwriting, Long Story, Short, an auto-biographical short form series premiered on Hulu to millions of views. As an author, Boland’s collection of short stories Eat Your Heart Out was chosen by leading Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail as one of Three Hot Summer Reads. She frequently writes personal essays.
Most recently, she co-wrote the finale of her long time collaborator’s Megan Park’s highly-anticipated new Amazon series Sterling Point.
katie's monthly advice column
All The Mistakes I've Made
current screenwriting collaborations
previous collaborations
“Actress-turned-writer Katie Boland is a notable new voice . Eat Your Heart Out is a vibrant collection, populated by well-drawn characters who are broken but bursting with life. Largely, it’s a book of chance encounters and reunions that tackles the ways people need, help and hurt each other, intentionally and unintentionally. Reminiscent of Hemingway’s sharp minimalism, paired with Kerouac’s verve, Eat Your Heart Out tackles being alive in the here and now, with sterling writing and stellar voices.”
“A stunning debut collection. These are characters we all have known or have been, rendered with unflinching honesty but also with compassion and wit.”
“Of all her current accomplishments, I think that the new web series is perhaps the most significant. Very much like Dunham’s Girls, Katie’s Long Story, Short revolves around the shared career angst and disastrous love lives of young 20-something girlfriends finding their way in an adult world.”
“You want proof that Long Story, Short is worth the hype? How about the fact that I just watched both available episodes back-to-back and am already craving the release of the next one? Boom, addicted.”
“With her sharpshooter eye and intrepid heart, Katie Boland is the love child of Dorothy Parker and Jack Kerouac.”
“In this radiantly written collection, Katie Boland tunnels into the beating, mysterious heart of human connections. Astonishing.”
“Boland’s web series, Long Story, Short is Girls meets Toronto…one of the most entertaining and raw web series of this current summer.”
“The best new thing on the internet…a funnier, more relatable answer to HBO’s Girls.”
select personal essays
Little Yellow Pill: On Antidepressants
"It would be okay if I died right now.” I used to think that as I fell asleep at night, but not in a hungry way. I wasn’t looking at pill bottles, knives or the rope in the basement. My thoughts of dying were emotionless: I could die. That would be okay. I accepted it.
I’ve never told anyone that until now.
“Does mental illness run in your family?” the doctor asked three months ago. I sat in his office crying. I had known him since I was a child. To say out loud how I felt, to finally name it, felt disgusting.
“Yes. It does.”
“On what side?”
“Depends who you ask.”
“So both,” the doctor said after a long pause.
Bi-polar, codependency and alcoholism don’t just run in my family, they gallop. Depression, which has two of my immediate family members in a stranglehold, is something we never talk about. Mania, showing up to Christmas smelling like vodka, loving drug addicts – that’s glamorous. You can laugh about that. But what’s funny about daydreaming about death?
The doctor diagnosed me with something called Perfectly Hidden Depression.” Doesn’t that sound fake?
“If there was something wrong with your brain, of course you’d hide it perfectly,” my brother said. “That’s so you.”
Full Story here
‘Messy girls’ are all over TV, but I wish there was a series that showed what female alcoholism is really like
She’s been crying. I don’t think she’s showered in a few days. She looks exhausted and brittle, jeans sliding down her hips. She pulls at her waistband; “This is a problem,” she sighs. “I’m too skinny.”
I’m at the dry cleaner, carrying an armful of dresses to be hemmed because I’m three inches shorter than I want to be. The skinny woman keeps talking, but she doesn’t have to. With one look, I know who I’m dealing with: an alcoholic. It’s not the physical qualities, the slurring or the smell, but the evasiveness, the calculated vacancy.
“I just ran away from rehab,” she whispers. This is performance at its finest.
I tell her I am close to four years sober. She can get help if she wants to. It doesn’t really land because she’s not really here.
“Do you have Botox? Are your eyebrows real? Do you want to see pictures of my son?”
She shoves her phones at me, her baby looks around two.
“My husband gave him bangs.” I can tell she hates her husband.
Full Story here
The Fall: Katie Boland’s Journey to Recovery
I feel cold cement beneath me. I’m sitting on a sidewalk. I look down at my dress. Why is it so bloody?
“You need stitches for your chin.”
What happened to my chin? I look down and see a rough bar napkin in my hand, pressed against the bottom half of my face. It’s soaked in blood. I can’t bite down on my left side. In a few hours, I’ll find out I broke two molars in half, too.
The man telling me I need medical attention is Australian, blonde and wearing a hat. I look at the pattern on his shirt, everything blurs. I ask the man’s name for what could be the hundredth time and forget it immediately. I don’t ask again. Even in this state, I know to pretend that we’ve experienced a mutual reality.
My mom calls. My brother calls. My boyfriend calls.
“Where are you?” they all ask.
I have no idea.
In the cab to the ER, I felt the space-time continuum shift from blacked out to sober. I’m an actress, a writer and a director. Whatever state I’m in, I think of life in scenes. Sinking into sobriety felt like when a director calls cut. You exhale. You let your face relax. You look around for some indication that you did a good job.
Instead, I saw a sliver of the cab driver in the rearview mirror. He was scared of me.
In movies, sober women are strong. Their arc is coherent. They start drunk, they struggle, they end sober. In reality, sober women are the most vulnerable adults. We wanted to disappear completely. Now, we walk around, just ourselves, with no armour at all.
Full Story here
All the Mistakes I’ve Made: Will Antidepressants Affect my Art?
As a woman deeply immersed in the world of art, I’ve been grappling with the decision to take antidepressants for my mental health struggles. I fear that it might alter my creative process or affect my identity as an artist. On the other hand, the daily battle with depression is taking a toll on both my personal life and artistic endeavours. How can I navigate this decision, considering the unique challenges that womanhood and the artistic journey bring to the table?
Sincerely,
A Creative Spirit at a Crossroads
Dear Creative Spirit at a Crossroads,
A crossroads, huh? What a pain in the ass.
Whenever I meet one (more frequently than I’d like) I try to forget my past. I think only about the future. It is hard to be a friend to someone who is depressed. We are so isolated and myopic. Often our sadness has nothing to do with reality. Please look past those exasperating symptoms and be a friend to yourself first.
What does future you look like?
Can she put things in perspective? Are there moments when she observes things, muted like a television?
Is she willing to trade a wide spectrum of feelings for stability?
You have made a career out of your emotions. You’re scared to fuck with them. You’re an artist – a vivid person and probably a little vulgar. Before I was medicated I thought I needed the vivid and vulgar parts of me.
Full Story here
All The Mistakes I’ve Made: The Pain of Old Patterns (And How to Break Them)
I can’t stop thinking about someone who is not only mean and horrible, but specifically mean and horrible to me. My intellectual understands that my old patterns make his cruelty feel like love but it still doesn’t stop my brain from obsessing! How can I escape this mind prison I made?!!!
Content Warning: Mentions of substance use and eating disorder.
There’s a rat in my apartment, a manifest metaphor for this year. We’ll get back to him.
It surprises me how much advice I give in this column that I need to give to myself. There is nothing so cleansing or reassuring as a vicarious sadness, so please take mine. I’ll take yours.
The inability to break old patterns or escape “mind prison” was my 2024. In reading your question, I can tell we are equally tired. Like me, a part of you hates yourself.
Here’s how you get out of this:
Read about intermittent reinforcement trials on rats. If you give a rat a feeder that sometimes dispenses a lot of food and then, randomly, none at all, the rat will lose its mind. It grows both feral and weak. Now, imagine that feeder is the person you love. Sometimes, I’m sure he’s very nice to you. Sometimes, he’s awful. You see what I’m getting at?
We are not here to be feral rats.
Let the person go. Feel every pathetic, painful and final feeling about them. Don’t try to bypass any of this. It won’t work.
I have spent an astounding amount of 2024 in tears. I thought my heart was broken and done. I am an avoidant person, I couldn’t avoid this. Grief is such a delusional motherfucker. You believe what happened could be reversible. You act like it never happened at all. You act like it wasn’t that bad.
That act is brittle, it’ll break.
Full Story here