Liz Tigelaar is no stranger to writing complicated women. Perhaps best known for showrunning Little Fires Everywhere with Reese Witherspoon (who she worked with again on this show, as Witherspoon served as an executive producer), as well as hidden gem Life Unexpected, messy family dynamics and layered female protagonists are firmly in her wheelhouse.

Which made her the perfect fit for Tiny Beautiful Things. Serving as the creator and showrunner, the series follows Clare (Kathryn Hahn), a woman whose marriage, career, and relationship with her daughter is falling apart. Despite this, her friend convinces her to take over an advice column — something she proves to be a natural at. In helping others heal, she herself begins to as well.
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I got a chance to speak with Tigelaar about how the show explores motherhood, collaborating with Kathryn Hahn, the refreshing way the show approaches its LGBTQ+ characters, and more.

TAYLOR GATES: Congratulations on the show. It exceeded my very high expectations, and with you at the helm, that’s really not a surprise. I’m a huge fan of your work. I’ve loved everything you’ve done, from Little Fires Everywhere to Life Unexpected. So just to start with kind of a fun question: Of all the characters you’ve written, who do you think would be the best advice columnist, and who do you think would be the worst?

LIZ TIGELAAR: Oh my god. That is a great question. Oh, man. I mean, I think Clare [from Tiny Beautiful Things], hands down, is the best because she has all of Cheryl [Strayed]’s, you know, brilliance with her. Who would be the worst? I’m gonna say Baze (Kristoffer Polaha) from Life Unexpected, I think. I would love Baze’s advice — I don’t know that I would take it, but I would love it. You know, he could be like a dark horse. You might be like, “This seems really bad, but it worked out.” Because I feel like for him, it kind of always did. [Laughs]

Image via Hulu

100%. I had the same thought, actually, so it’s amazing we’re on the same wavelength with that one. Going into this show: I really love the way that it explores motherhood, both with Clare and Frankie and Clare and Rae. Can you talk a little bit about how you approached that theme? Because I think it shines through so strongly.

Yeah. Motherhood and daughterhood are certainly the biggest themes of my life. The biggest things I am are a mother and a daughter. And it’s certainly, for Cheryl, that the love of her mother and the loss of her mother are the kind of roots of her writing. Everything kind of comes from that. And so I really feel like the show is about love, and it doesn’t mean that it’s uncomplicated, but it’s rich, and it’s deep, and it’s complex. That’s what a mother-daughter relationship is. There are a lot of things I wanted to explore with it with Clare as a character. What does it mean to revere and cherish your own mother so deeply and to have lost her? And then what does it mean to not feel those things from your own daughter? To not feel revered or cherished, and to feel like, in some ways, she’s losing her, too?

And what does it feel like to be that daughter? What does it feel like to never be able to be that thing that your mother craves, which is her own mother? And that, no matter what you do, you’re not going to fill that hole because it’s unfillable? And what does that feel like as a daughter? And so there are so many complexities we talked about in the writers’ room. What does it mean to have lost your mother young? And what does it mean to have your mother here but to never feel like you’ve really had her? You know, there are so many different versions of mother loss, and there are so many different versions of daughterhood. And so I think we just wanted to explore all those things with the show.

Image via Hulu

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Of course, everything starts on the page, but I do think it’s cool when actors sort of surprise you by interpreting something you’ve written in maybe a way you hadn’t thought of before or bringing something unexpected to the role. Is there anything that Kathryn brought to Clare that surprised you but that you ended up really loving?

Oh, man. I mean, for me — and not that there weren’t moments that surprised me — but I think…it’s not a surprise because I knew how talented she was, but I don’t think you know until you’re sitting across from somebody working at that level how it’s going to feel. And I think I would just sit in video village and be so blown away by her, her performance, how every take felt a little different, how she kept upping the game, upping the game, upping the game. And I think just to work in that way and then to get to go in and collaborate and to be excited and to talk about it and then go back into the scene — it was just an excitement. It was a pulsating energy I had never felt it so deeply before.

There’s obviously a really beautiful and satisfying ending, but I’m greedy, and I think that there’s a lot more potential to keep mining things from these characters. So if there were to be another season, what would you want to explore in that?

Oh my gosh. I mean, obviously, it was kind of broken with a beginning, middle, and end as a limited series. But I think, in terms of the exploration, there’s a fundamental idea of the show, which is that we are all Sugar — that all our stories are worthy and that we all have so much inside of us that we can offer to others. And so I think, under that umbrella, those are the tentacles that I would keep exploring. But I mean, obviously, I could write people all day long. You know, Little Fires Everywhere, I’m like, “Where did you go on that bus?” This is what I do. I prolong things — that’s why I work in television. I’m always interested in mining and digging. And I think, with this story, the idea was to drop in on this woman and to not tie everything up or not to say that there’s not more tumultuous things and more upheaval. But it’s a story of a woman healing something with her daughter because she healed something with her own ideas about her mother, her mother’s death, and the loss of her mother. And that healing is gonna heal something in her that’s going to let her become who she wanted to become.

I have to say, as a queer woman, it was really refreshing to see this sort of casual LGBTQ+ representation with Rae. Can you talk a little bit about how you approached that? Because it’s never preachy, it’s never over the top — it just is, and I really love that.

As a queer woman as well, I feel the same way. Tanzyn [Crawford] and I were just talking about it last night. I can remember way back in the day on Brothers & Sisters with Matthew Rhys’s Kevin. It was so nice to have a character where being gay was one of many, many things that he was — he was the pragmatist, he was the lawyer, he was the one who brought them all together, he was rational, he had a family. I loved that about that show. And I think in approaching this show, I just wanted it to be, like, Clare’s more thrown of, “Why is there a guy involved? Like, what was that guy doing here? Like that doesn’t…that doesn’t go. That’s not what I thought you were doing.” I loved it. I loved how it was never a conversation they had to have. It’s just what is. Because that’s how I feel for my own child. That’s how I hope he feels. There’s no more “coming out.” I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be coming out stories because, of course, they’re important, but I think it’s also just great to have stories where people don’t have to come or go anywhere. They just are the way everybody else gets to just be. And I love that. I really wanted to tell a story about it where it wasn’t the story.

Image via Hulu

I know that you’ve been asked what advice you would give to your younger self, but I kind of want to flip that a bit and ask, if you could tell your future 70- or 80-year-old self something, what would you want to tell her?

Oh my gosh. You know what’s so funny? You know how there was that thing where you could, like, make your face old or make your face young, and then everybody did, and then everybody was like, “Now people are just spying on you, and you just did facial recognition to, like, life?”

Yes. [Laughs]

I have to say…so, I fell for it and did it. And I was like, “Why did I do this?” When I saw my older face…I’m adopted, but I saw my mom — my adoptive mom. I saw my mom’s face in my face, even though I was much more wrinkly than my mom is. My mom somehow has no wrinkles. But in my eyes, I saw my mom, and when I saw it, I just was struck by like how beautiful it was. And I don’t know — I think I would want my older self to know how beautiful she is. Not just face but that she lived a beautiful life. [Laughs and gets choked up.] It makes me want to cry!

All episodes of Tiny Beautiful Things will be available to stream on Hulu April 7.