Jane Schoenbrun’s Public Access Afterworld Turns Fiction Into a Way of Seeing

Jane Schoenbrun wears Shirt Moschino.

For Jane Schoenbrun, fiction doesn’t sit safely apart from life. Stories can shape the people who make them, offer language for experiences that have felt hard to name, and let an imagined self take up space. That feedback loop runs through the filmmaker’s first novel, Public Access Afterworld, a queer, speculative science-fiction horror story that moves across decades and ventures into a hidden dimension beyond television static.

Schoenbrun has been working at the border between screens and reality for years. Their 2024 film I Saw the TV Glow made that tension into an eerie, intimate drama; last summer’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma took a more slasher-inflected route. The novel extends those questions through characters who are vividly distinct yet carry pieces of their author. In a conversation with actor and director Kristen Stewart, Schoenbrun traces how the book grew from an abandoned television project into a daily writing practice, and why making art can feel like performing a self into being.

MONDAY 5 PM AUGUST 31, 2026 UPSTATE NY

Connection beyond the usual categories

The conversation opens with Stewart’s reaction to her film The Wrong Girls, which Schoenbrun watched the night before. What stayed with them was the film’s attention to a bond that doesn’t fit neatly into a romantic couple. Schoenbrun describes having a person in their life who isn’t a romantic partner but shares most evenings with them on the couch, and who matters more than almost anyone.

Stewart pushes back on the word “platonic” when it’s used to make such a connection sound lesser. A relationship can feel deeply romantic, she suggests, even when sex isn’t part of it. Schoenbrun agrees, adding that sex can complicate a life without necessarily making a bond more important. They’re still married to their wife, who is nearby doing stretches, but say that the people close to them no longer fit a conventional hierarchy. Some are lovers, some friends; some relationships include sex, others don’t. Schoenbrun feels fortunate to have six people who know them well.

That openness isn’t presented as a tidy formula. Stewart reflects that familiar relationship models can feel restrictive until a person starts to question them. At 36, she says, she’s only now finding that she doesn’t need to measure her life against other people’s. Schoenbrun responds with recognition: the hardest part can be noticing how much outside expectations shape our sense of how we should relate.

The exchange offers a useful lens on Public Access Afterworld. The book’s interest in intimacy isn’t confined to conventional romance. Its emotional world makes room for attachment, friendship, desire and loyalty to overlap without granting one form of connection automatic priority. Schoenbrun and Stewart speak about that idea as something lived, rather than as a theory to be imposed on the characters.

A long route from television to a novel

Stewart is reading the book and tells Schoenbrun that its characters seem to speak in distinct voices while still feeling connected to the writer. She asks whether writing them felt like splitting into several selves. Schoenbrun laughs, then admits that finishing a book was intimidating. The process recalled learning to make films: at first, the work felt embarrassing, and skill arrived gradually.

For six months, Schoenbrun rewrote the opening 30 pages, repeatedly wondering whether the draft was something they would want to read. They also became preoccupied with dialogue, worrying that the style might be all conversation with too little between it. The challenge, as they describe it, was to bring their taste into line with what they could make on the page.

The novel began as something else. After completing I Saw the TV Glow, Schoenbrun wanted to keep building its world and wrote two full seasons of television. Long-form storytelling had been a childhood habit: when they weren’t spending time online, they were inventing original stories and mapping out how a series might unfold. They eventually wrote 1,600 pages of scripts, including a detailed plan for where a later-season episode would begin.

But Schoenbrun had made a film for $100,000, and could see that the television project was unlikely to reach the screen in the form they imagined. A tattoo from Jack Haven, at Schoenbrun’s request, gave that realization a concise instruction: “Make it real.” The phrase became a reason to get the material out of their head and into another form. Writing the novel took years; Schoenbrun moved upstate to work on it and says the editing took about twice as long as the first draft. For them, the exact words mattered too much to rush.

Stewart sees the shift as an answer to having more ideas than one medium can hold. Schoenbrun’s own account makes clear that changing forms wasn’t simply a practical move. The book let them keep working with a story after its television version seemed out of reach, while giving the writing a different pace and set of demands.

Writing as a daily practice

That pace changed Schoenbrun’s relationship with the work. While developing I Saw the TV Glow, they would think about the project for years, then lock themselves in a bedroom and write intensively for a few weeks, often ending the day in a panic. The novel, by contrast, gave them a routine they enjoyed and found healthy: wake up, make coffee, write at a desk, take a long walk, and return to the people and life beyond the story.

The distinction also speaks to what happens when a film moves from script to production. Writing gives Schoenbrun time alone with the material. Directing means helping other people bring the work into being, and handling the practical demands that shape the finished film. Stewart wonders whether that logistics-heavy role can get in the way of feeling visible in the work, especially when the people around the director understand the material and reflect it back.

Schoenbrun says that visibility can change over the years it takes to make a project. By the time they were ready to direct, they had become a different person from the one who first lived with the story. The work had to reconnect with a present emotional stake: what still resonated with them in characters such as Abel, Jules and Willa? Without that active connection, the writing would lose force. They see a similar need in filmmaking.

For Schoenbrun, both writing and directing involve performance. The contrast is clearest when they’re with loved ones, where they don’t feel they’re acting out a part. They connect their skill at performing to experiences of trans trauma: as a child, they learned that people expected a version of them that wasn’t true to who they were. That learned ability to perform, they say, became part of what helps them make films. Stewart replies that Schoenbrun has since found a performance they want to give.

Being seen, and choosing a self

Stewart widens the point beyond filmmaking. People are often trying to shape how others feel, she says, and that effort doesn’t make every interaction false. Looking back at her own behavior, she can see moments she might have handled differently. For her, those revisions are part of trying to become the person she wants to be and to get closer to other people.

Schoenbrun connects the idea to Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which they describe as a film about self-awareness becoming an obstacle. The answer isn’t to abandon self-knowledge. It’s to act in a way that feels exciting and true, instead of becoming trapped in the effort to monitor every part of oneself. Stewart calls familiar defaults crushing; both suggest that the roles people inherit can be difficult to notice until they begin to loosen their grip.

The films’ reactions, Schoenbrun says, can reveal how differently people encounter gender and sexuality. Some viewers feel the work has given shape to something they recognized but couldn’t explain; others don’t know what to make of it. Schoenbrun thinks the films touch experiences that some people understand from the inside and others simply haven’t had. That divide isn’t a measure of who is paying attention. It can reflect how much the underlying experience is shared.

Stewart is interested in how the novel extends Schoenbrun’s earlier work. She loves I Saw the TV Glow and sees the book as a related piece that carries some of its concerns into another medium. Schoenbrun, meanwhile, senses a growing spiritual dimension in their work, despite an ambivalent relationship to belief. Their formulation is less about a settled answer than a reciprocal process: people make stories, and stories in turn make the people who encounter them. Fiction, in that sense, can help reality take shape.

Schoenbrun recalls 2019 and 2020 as a time when they were frightened and ashamed to become the person they knew they wanted to be. They describe “faking it” as a way through that uncertainty: imagining themselves as a confident trans artist before they felt able to inhabit that identity. The book’s girls, Stewart says, are funny, cool and frightening, and their sharp exchanges hurt precisely because they care about one another. Schoenbrun agrees that the characters can be terrible to each other. Their messiness is part of what makes the relationships feel alive.

A hero story with complications

Schoenbrun’s agent, Bill Clegg, has described the book as a hero’s journey. Schoenbrun sees the outline: a trans girl realizes she is a superhero and tries to save the world. But they’re wary of a story that makes personal transformation look like a clean triumph under the hero’s control.

One character, Bethany, is beloved by Schoenbrun and also fictionalized from parts of them. David and Bethany represent opposing possibilities: one resembles a version of Schoenbrun’s pre-transition self that they fear, while the other reflects an imagined ideal after transition. By the novel’s end, those figures are competing over the question of which self is real. Stewart jokes that Bethany’s name calls for a cape, but the tension beneath the joke is central to the book’s shape.

“Make it real” can sound like a command to pick one identity and make it permanent. Schoenbrun sees the phrase as more complicated: choices shape reality, but the story’s characters don’t always have equal power to make them. They describe having feared that they might not live long because they were depressed and hated the life, gender and body they inhabited. Becoming a famous trans artist exceeded their expectations, yet they’re uncomfortable with any reading that makes the change sound like wish fulfillment or a simple act of manifestation.

There is, they say, something meaningful in finding the place that hurts and changing one’s relationship to it. But Bethany’s role as a potential savior doesn’t mean she controls the forces around her. She can be the hero of a fictional narrative and still be damaged by what that role demands. At times, Schoenbrun suggests, the character seems to insist on being a hero as a way to escape the feeling of being powerless, even as the story shows the limits of that insistence.

That’s why Bethany isn’t just an idealized figure Schoenbrun wishes they could become. The desire to imagine the coolest version of oneself becomes part of the book’s subject. Stewart responds to the characters’ specificity: they don’t feel like stock figures placed in service of a lesson. They feel driven by want, contradiction and fear.

Their discussion briefly turns to the experience of having several voices or viewpoints active in the mind. Schoenbrun asks whether Stewart ever notices two people in their head talking while they’re falling asleep; she says no, though she’s glad it happens to them. Stewart describes approaching things from five angles, then finding that those angles eventually come together. Schoenbrun recognizes that as a familiar and beautiful kind of complexity.

Back to ordinary life

When Stewart asks what comes next, Schoenbrun says they’re trying to hide from the internet. After being on a press tour since May, they’re tired of talking about themselves and want to direct their attention outward again. Stewart points to the warm response the film has received, but Schoenbrun’s answer is characteristically grounded: the county fair takes place behind their house that weekend, and they plan to see the demo derby and eat a meatball sub from a stand that fills a hollowed-out loaf with meatballs.

Stewart, meanwhile, has been asked to take on a television role as an iconic figure in American history. She describes it as a big, demanding part involving an accent, physical preparation, sports and a great deal of dialogue. It’s a change from the strange, personal roles she has taken on more recently. She also has a directing project ahead and jokes that she’s looking forward to keeping the two jobs in separate compartments.

They end by agreeing that they should spend time together away from the interview. That closing impulse fits the conversation: its most compelling ideas about performance and fiction keep returning to the people who know us beyond the work. Schoenbrun’s novel may reach toward a hidden world, but its real charge lies in the choices, friendships and imagined selves that shape a life in plain sight.

Suit, shirt, Belt, and Shoes Givenchy by Sarah Burton.

Cape and Skirt Dries Van Noten. T-shirt Mr. Saturday. Shoes Givenchy by Sarah Burton.

Hair Emily Knapton using R+Co.

Makeup Ayami Nishimura using Laura Mercier.

Photography Assistant Kendal Walker.

Fashion Assistant Shannon Gorman.

Production Director: Alexandra Weiss.

Photo Producer: Georgia Ford.

On-set Production Giselle Quinones.