How I came to
write this film.
First published on Greenlit.
I wrote Eat Your Heart Out as a direct response to the absurd world of being a single 33 year old woman in 2026. I felt smothered by the expectation and pressure to partner up, escpecially given that the films, literature and theatre I grew up loving rarely passed the Bechdel Test. And so I listened to the voices of, “You just need to put yourself out there! It’s a numbers game!” - not to mention the foul reminders of one’s ‘biological clock.’ I went on the dates, and I went on more, and more. Each time I left feeling somewhere on the spectrum of mildly amused to utterly horrified by the emptiness of the interactions.
As an ex-English teacher and bookworm, I’m a poetry nut and a huge fan of Mary Oliver. Two lines from her poetry (see next page) have stuck with me for years and left me questioning, what do I want? What do I really truly want? The answer feels complicated. It is incredibly difficult for a recovering people-pleaser (see previous film, No Worries If Not! for context) to get a grasp on such things whilst unlacing the social pressures that have been etched into your brain over three decades. There was one desire I felt sure of. I want a burger. I always want a burger. And yet, even that is complicated. I’m not a vegan and so I regular exercise this desire, but in order to do so, I have to hold a fairly high level of cognitive dissonance to enjoy said burger without remembering the cruel costs of factory farming. In 2020, I published a poetry anthology (Getting Over Myself, and Other People) featuring a poem about this very feeling.
And then I saw the link. A world in which the pressure to find a partner, the guilt of contributing to industrial agriculture, and the horrors of the modern dating scene could be weaved together to answer my one true culinary desire.
All lines from Ava’s dates have been taken verbatim from real dates in 2025 and 2026,
meaning this film will truly capture the realities of dating in today’s world. The happy ending to my story is that with each bad date and absurd conversation, I was presented with the answer to Mary Oliver’s question. What I want is to make a film that tells the truth about desire and societial pressures -
because after all,
Emma Jayne Hodgkinson
we’re just hungry really.