Episode Details

What if the worst thing anyone ever said to you became the story that changed your life? 

This week, Marie Claire Editor Georgie McCourt sits down with playwright, screenwriter and memoirist Lally Katz to talk about My Cursed Vagina, her brutally funny, wildly honest and unexpectedly moving memoir drawn from the past fifteen years of her life. 

Before the awards, theatre acclaim and Hollywood success, Lally was a woman searching for love in all the wrong places: emotionally unavailable men, disastrous dates, psychic readings, one-night stands, impulsive decisions and relationships that left her questioning whether something inside her was fundamentally broken. 

Then, during a snowstorm in New York, a psychic named Cookie told her she was cursed. According to Cookie, the problem was not just Lally’s love life. It was her vagina. 

What follows is a conversation that moves between laugh-out-loud absurdity and profound emotional honesty. Georgie and Lally unpack the stories women tell themselves about love, desirability, self-worth and the dangerous habit of mistaking longing for intimacy. 

In this conversation, Lally and Georgie talk about love, sex, shame, motherhood, creativity, heartbreak and the messy, humiliating, funny, deeply human things women do while trying to be chosen, understood and loved.   

This episode covers: 

• The psychic reading in New York that inspired My Cursed Vagina 

• Why women can mistake intensity, longing and obsession for love 

• The boyfriend who called Lally his “flatmate” for eighteen months and refused to give her a key 

• Chasing emotionally unavailable men across cities and continents 

• Tinder, one-night stands, dating chaos and romantic fantasy 

• Receiving a herpes diagnosis and deciding to talk openly about STI stigma