Marti Noxon: "To be perfectly candid I was struggling. My eating disorder morphed into an issue with alcohol and I got sober when I was 24, and then guess what? I thought I got better, and gave [drinking] another run right after I turned 50. I was aware that I needed to stop and I’d gone back into therapy for it, but I was still really struggling with addiction when I was writing the script. I was really working hard to ask myself why I would pick something up again that had done me harm in the past. I started to draw the parallels to when I was using food to try to control my life and I was able to understand that, even though [anorexia and substance abuse] work really differently, the goal was the same, which was to numb my feelings. To not feel whatever it was that I was afraid of... Control is, what’s underneath the desire to control it, it’s a desire to stave off something that frightens you or something you feel powerless over and those feelings are just so uncomfortable. But when we started to film, I was sober again and I started to need to turn to the other female producers quite frequently and say, ‘I’m going to need you to tell me that I don’t need to lose weight.’