Writing pilots is such a specific thing. It's not even really writing TV shows. A pilot is its own beast.

Another thing I also recommend is washing your face with white towels, little white towels instead of your hands. Other towels have dye in them and, with water on them, I just don't mess around with that. This way you're not getting your hands back on your dirty face as you're washing it. You're going to see what's coming off.

I like the way [Marcus Lemonis] thinks. He's made me think about things in a different way. He's made me want to support small businesses in a very real way, seeing what these small-business owners go through and the struggle it is and the courage it takes to put your heart and money behind things at a 24-hour job. I think I relate to that as an actress and a writer and someone who works freelance, in many ways. It never ends, you never clock out. You've always got to keep things moving.

[The Women's Room] is one of those pieces of fiction that reveals itself in a different way every time. It's incredible.

There were a lot of different things [in The Women's Room ]. I don't really want to summarize it in this way. It's about a woman's awakening, a woman who came of age in the '50s and is a teenager - actually, she's a little bit older - in the '60s and part of the women's movement and how she ends up there.

The sexual revolution... it was the first time I had read anything that came close to describing those feelings of being outside of my body, feeling the shame, all of it, that I really was able to connect to in that book. So it sort of blew my mind. I was also listening to Tori Amos at the same time, so I was like, "Wait, what's happening?!" It was all a part of that, probably when I was, like, 13.

I remember my dad watched a lot of TV that we watched, too. I remember watching Saved By The Bell because me and my sister watched it, and my dad kind of watched it with us, too, while he was cooking or whatever he was doing in the kitchen.