Sarah Goldberg and Susan Stanley on fertility, family, and the modern reality of motherhood
A still from SisterS, a comedy-drama that follows two women — one from Canada and the other from Ireland — who discover they’re half-sisters.
It is a beautiful, crisp afternoon when I catch up with Sarah Goldberg and Susan Stanley on Zoom — here, not in London, that is. Speaking to me from separate locations on opposite sides of the city, the women are cocooning inside, away from the weather.
“It’s a major duvet day here, it’s monsooning,” laughs Sarah, holding a mug of something warm.
Wrapped up in layers of winter woollies, the duo are friendly and affable, and extremely passionate about what they do. Currently doing the rounds to promote season two of — a series they co-wrote, co-produced, and star in together — it’s clear that they have a sort of shorthand; unsurprising after 20-plus years of friendship.
If you’re unfamiliar with the show, it’s a comedy-drama that follows two women — one from Canada and the other from Ireland — who discover they’re half-sisters. Season one is set in Ireland and sees the twosome embark on a road trip to find their alcoholic father. It explores themes of family, identity, belonging, and culture as we see how the absence of a parent impacts Sare and Suze into their 30s.
In season two, the action moves to Canada, with the storyline digging deeper into what happens when life doesn’t give you what you want, and what it takes to wake up to the fact that you already have what you need. Motherhood is central this season, reflecting the women’s own, at times rocky, journeys to motherhood.
“Art imitated life in that way,” acknowledges Susan, who used a donor to become a solo mum. Six weeks later, Sarah also became a mother.
Showing the truth of things, particularly the hardships of undergoing IVF, was very important to them, they tell me. According to Susan, who went through the process herself, it was simultaneously “incredibly dark and incredibly funny”. The injections, the bruising, safely disposing of the needles, it’s a “dirty business”, as she puts it.
“It’s wildly inconvenient, and you just don’t know what’s going to happen,” Susan says. “It felt like I was putting all my money on black, you know? We wanted to show all of that in a kind of honest, funny, real way.”
Sarah chimes in: “Women are going through this alongside holding down their jobs, caring for family members, or whatever it is. You might be at a gig, but you can’t miss that trigger warning, so you’ve got to get to a toilet and inject those hormones. Fertility is an unfair game. It’s tough that there’s no control over something that is such a big choice in a woman’s life. For some women, it’s very easy; for others, it’s very complicated. We wanted to explore that with honest detail, but intertwined with all of the other narratives taking place, because that’s how we’ve witnessed our friends — and ourselves — going through it.”
While the title, , suggests biology, both women agree that the series is also about chosen bonds. Is blood thicker than water, I wonder?
“We talk a lot about our chosen family,” nods Susan. “I came to London over 20 years ago and met Sarah in drama school. We had this very deep, subterranean, soulful connection. Romantic love is celebrated a lot, but there’s something about those platonic relationships — they’re the bedrock of my own life. I survive in this world with this coven of women, who are my chosen family. I wouldn’t survive without them. That’s been a big theme in our writing as well: The people you meet who keep you sane, who understand you, who see all the gnarly bits and love you anyway. They’re what sustain me.”
I tell Susan that she’s rich in life for having such connections, and she smiles: “It would be very hard to move through the world without that.”
In the context of the show, season one is about Sare and Suze discovering their biological connection and being very excited by that, but season two is where their deeper need for each other to help them get through this stage of life takes hold.
“There can be depth from a biological con
nection, and a familiarity that you can’t quite comprehend or intellectualise, but at the same time, as Susan has said, chosen family is what’s gotten us through our adult lives,” explains Sarah. “The title took on new meaning for us this season. We joked that we had SisterS season two by day, which was on set, and then SisterS season two by night, which was uslooking after two small babies that we’re raising as sisters. We really feel that our daughters are sisters of the soul — whether they like it or not!”
Season one of the show was six years in the making; season two had just a six-month turnaround. Add in two newborns and, safe to say, things were very different this time around. Juggling it all was admittedly a struggle at times, but having the babies around grounded Sarah and Susan in a way they hadn’t perhaps expected.
“We all lived in one big house together in freezing-cold Ontario, in the dead of winter,” remembers Sarah. “Us, the babies, and our dear friend Sophie Thompson [who plays Sheryl in the show]. We had this funny little dysfunctional family together. [Babies] force you to be in the present, which was very helpful because we were making television at such a pace and there was no time to do the coulda, shoulda, woulda. You need to keep going and move forward, and think about tomorrow. Being in the present with these tiny people who need you for their survival was very humbling. We had so much joy on the weekends; it really infused the show as well.”
Regarding the representation of women — specifically mothers — in film and TV, Sarah says she feels heartened in many ways.
“We always have a hunger to see more female voices being represented in film and television, but I do feel encouraged. I feel encouraged by a lot of male writers and directors who are also taking on the subject matter and aren’t shying away from portraying different types of motherhood as well.”
In real life, things might be improving on a macro level, but unfortunately, that’s not the case everywhere.
“We’ve seen such massive change in such a short period of time, but change that felt so victorious and permanent suddenly feels so fragile again,” Sarah continues. “I lived in America for Donald Trump’s original inauguration and was at all the women’s marches, watching everything be rolled back in a way that you can’t believe you’re seeing in your own lifetime. For the women of the generation above us, the pain of what they feel they fought for and won — to see that retracted as they look towards the end of their lives — is brutal.”
As our conversation winds down, it becomes clear that isn’t simply about motherhood, IVF, or even sisterhood, but living life on your own terms — whether that’s choosing to become a mother or choosing not to; it’s the ‘choice’ part that really matters.
“My grandmother had 13 children; my mother had four. There was no birth control in their day,” says Susan, referring to the ban on contraception, which was only lifted in the 1980s with the introduction of the Health (Family Planning) Act and further amendments. “Now, I have the opportunity as a woman to freeze my eggs and become a solo parent if I want to.”
If audiences are to take anything from this season, Susan points to this: “You’ve got to figure out whatever you want to do and live life on your own terms. [Sarah and I] have plenty of friends who have chosen not to have children, and they have amazing lives. So it’s not just about banging the motherhood drum — it’s really about figuring out what your own internal map is and trying to stay true to that rather than using someone else’s.”
- airs Thursday sat 10.15pm on RTÈ One and RTÈ Player
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