When four-time Emmy nominee Sharon Horgan set out to write her latest show, HBO’s Youth, she found herself fixating on a visit to the Hay Literary Festival.
“I just found it a very specific world, and I found authors a very specific type, and the more I looked into it, the more I thought, this is something I could really have fun writing,” the showrunner tells PW of her path to making the main character of Youtha literary agent.
Horgan plays Alex, a perimenopausal single mother and agent at a boutique agency in London, the controlled chaos of the character’s professional life mirroring her even messier personal life.
I wanted Alex to have one of those
“I wanted Alex to have one of those all-consuming jobs, particularly one of those jobs that I think women are very good at, and they work around their fucking crazy lives, but the job itself doesn’t really have a start time or a finish time if you’re into it and you’re good at it,” Horgan says. And to be an agent, “you have to be mother to so many people, and you really have to be prepared to parent adults and put up with so much shit.”
To make sure that she captured the specific textures of working in publishing, Horgan hit the books, consulting several authors and agents, including Sloane Crosley and Felicity Blunt of Curtis Brown. Her mainrlin-based agent and bookseller who has held practically every role in the industry, as the show’s literary consultant
“I’ve worked in bookshops. I’ve been a scout. I’ve been a publicist. I’ve been a publisher. I’ve been a managing director. I’ve done most jobs across publishing,” Lovegrove tells PW.
When Lovegrove’s friend Dawn Shadforth, who eventually directed
So when Lovegrove’s friend Dawn Shadforth, who eventually directed several episodes of Youth’s first season, asked if she’d answer a few questions for Horgan, Lovegrove was game. The two shared a mutual admiration after their first Zoom call, and formalized Lovegrove’s involvement, answering questions about anything and everything
Horgan and the Youthteam were interested in “all of the different elements and the machinations that make up the publishing industry from how a book gets from an author to an agent through to the publishing house to a bookshop and then the parties—all of those things,” Lovegrove says.
“What I loved,” she continues, “was the detail that they really wanted of how a contract works, what royalties look like, what does it look like if a writer has writer’s block and they’ve got a certain amount of books to deliver, but they’re not able to. It’s just all of this stuff that makes up our everyday. It’s been amazing to watch how the minutiae of our daily life as publishing people has been projected onto the screen.”
Lovegrove’s experience as a Black woman
Lovegrove’s experience as a Black woman in an overwhelming white industry informed the show as well. Horgan had already written Alex’s friend and boss, Sam, as a Black woman, but didn’t realize how extreme the industry’s racial divide was. Lovegrove was impressed by how Horgan talked about the character and handled the topic without “literally whitewashing it.” By coincidence, Sam even shares Lovegrove’s initials—it felt meant to be.
“She was like, ‘It’s like you’re writing about my life,’” Horgan says. “It’s just fucking weird the way life and art throws those things up to you sometimes.”
“I just felt so grateful to her for highlighting a character who could be in publishing but actually is missing, without knowing that was the case,” Lovegrove says. “This is why we need people to tell our stories and to show us what is there, but also what’s missing. Even if that’s not the focus—it’s not a story about race, but for publishing, the conversations about race are really pertinent.”
Horgan’s barometer of truth, as she calls Lovegrove,
Horgan’s “barometer of truth,” as she calls Lovegrove, hit the mark: Literary professionals have told both women that they recognize their world on screen.
“When I was at Frankfurt Book Fair in October, earlier this month, people were coming up to me like, ‘Have you seen that show? It’s amazing.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I worked on it,’ ” Lovegrove recalls. “It was the most meta thing to be in the Frankfurter Hof talking to people about a show that was set in the Frankfurter Hof, that I’d worked on. I’ve spent my entire career wanting to demystify publishing, and this felt like the biggest platform to be able to do that.”
Horgan would have been “gutted” if the show, which airs its first-season finale on Sunday, hadn’t connected with publishing pros.
We always wanted publishers, agents, editors, we wanted
“We always wanted publishers, agents, editors, we wanted them to recognize the world, which is why it was so great to have Sharmaine,” Horgan says, “because she was able to say, ‘That wouldn’t happen. This is the language you would use. This is why this would be high stakes.’”
Beyond the entertainment value, Lovegrove says the show can be a re
“I’ve been saying to my authors, they’re like, ‘What happens at Frankfurt?’ and I’m just like, just watch Sharon’s show,” she says. “Now it can be a really useful crib sheet for people who want to know about how the industry works and to remember the human element of it.”
