Yahoo Finance Author Kelly Oxford Gets Personal with First Film Pink Skies Ahead , Based on Her Own Panic Disorder
MTV Studios
For writer Kelly Oxford, the best-selling author of Everything Is Perfect When You're a Liar and When You Find Out the World Is Against You, opening up about her personal life has always come easily. She did, after all, rise to fame in the aughts by being an early Twitter star whose wry observations earned her nearly a million followers, and scored of fans and Hollywood friends.
But it was a story she told in her second book—about suffering from a surprise panic attack while in line for coffee—that resonated with audiences so much that it led to her first feature film. Pink Skies Ahead, now streaming on MTV and POP, stars Jessica Barden (The End of the F***ing World) as a college dropout who moves back home and finds the real world crippling—because she, like Oxford, has undiagnosed panic disorder.
"I didn't start talking about it until I wrote the essay that the movie was based off of," Oxford, 43, tells PEOPLE of being diagnosed with the disorder. "And it felt really good to write about it. Then when I went on book tour, that was the essay that everybody talked about and said that they could relate to."
Oxford says so many readers would tell her that they too had just been diagnosed with anxiety disorder that she realized it was commonplace, despite not being openly discussed. "When I was considering ideas to write for my next script, this one just made sense to me—so many people connected to it on the page, so I could only assume more people with access to a movie at home on screen would also feel the same way."
Pink Skies Ahead, which came out May 8, is a coming-of-age film about a young woman's own struggles with "adulting." Oxford says that everyone involved, from the cast to the crew, says they related to the material. "This whole process has just made me feel more normal in my not normalness," she says. "When we were shooting, the cast and crew talked to me about the different levels of anxiety that they feel, and why they were connected to this project and they wanted to do it."
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She's grateful that the subject has stopped being so taboo to talk about, especially during Mental Health Awareness month. "Even from the beginning of this making this film, it already got people to, open up, which I think is so valuable."
While Pink Skies Ahead was originally destined for a theatrical release in 2020, the COVID pandemic derailed those plans, but Oxford says she's happy that it ended up on the small screen in the end. "Considering the subject matter of the movie, it might be more comfortable for people to watch it at home, and be at home afterwards," she says. "I want it to be a comfort movie for people, and I'm kind of seeing it that way now—that people are going to be comfortable when they're watching it. I like that idea."
Oxford, an early blogger whose funny and candid Twitter feed helped her get noticed in Hollywood over a decade ago, not only wrote the film's script, but also got behind the camera for the first time—a process she loved. "It was so much fun to be in charge of a group project and put the right people together to show off their talents," she says. The mom of three credits her already full life with making the directing task easier.
"I've been a mother for 20 years and I've been multitasking like crazy, going between work, and my kids, and my social life, and directing. I've had so much practice with juggling things, being a mom and a woman with a full life that all of these tasks didn't feel daunting for me, even though it was the first time doing it," she says.
Though she does admit that mothering two teenagers and one college-age child during the pandemic hasn't been easy in the slightest.
"My youngest is only 12, and for a 12 year old girl to not be able to see her friends at the point of her life, when that's all she's interested in doing was really, really hard on her," she says. "And of course, you can only be as happy as your unhappiest child. So it's been really a stressful year as a parent. I've heard from every single parent that I know that it's been very difficult for them as well."
Oxford says it's also been a year of change and growth for her, professionally but also personally. In 2016, in response to Donald Trump's "locker room talk," she asked her Twitter followers to tweet their first assault. The hashtag #notokay took off and 27 million women (and men) responded with their own horrific stories. She realized the power of her words and online actions.
Now, she looks at her social media presence through a new lens.
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"I think recently, and over the past year of COVID, I've just taken a lot more stock in what's important to say and what was just me being bored and posting whatever, because I thought it was funny," she says. "And with the movie coming out as well, I want people to be able to come to my Twitter page or my Instagram and see what's reflected in my work as well. And that it's not just selfies with nothing to say."
She also stopped posting images of her children now that they're older, unless they give her the OK. "That's been probably the biggest change in my social media over the last few years, is just not making my family a part of it anymore."
Now that Pink Skies Ahead, which also stars Marcia Gay Harden, Mary J. Blige, and Evan Ross is out, Oxford is turning her attention back to writing again—she's in the midst of writing two Young Adult novels, and is fully embracing the opportunity to reach a young female audience again.
"I'm a huge fan of YA and people like Judy Blume, because they really were such a formative part of my life," she says. "Being a young girl and reading the Judy Blume books, I was like, wow. So my thoughts that are really deep and all of my emotions that are really deep are normal."
She adds, "Even as an adult, speaking directly to young women, I feel is something that comes naturally to me in the sense that I want to make them feel seen. Puberty is such a confusing time, and growing up is such a confusing time. And if there's a way that through my writing, I can make it less confusing for young women, then I'm all for it. That's what I'm hoping happens with Pink Skies Ahead."
