When Zoe Kazan learned she was going to adapt “East of Eden,” she knew it meant she’d be destroying a copy of John Steinbeck’s 1952 novel with scribbled notes in different colors, highlights and earmarked edges. So she ordered a used one from Powell’s Books — it has somebody else’s last name written on it, she points out. “It’s a treasure to me,” she said during a recent video call from London.
Steinbeck’s Cain and Abel-inspired novel follows two families across decades as a way to explore good and evil, legacy, free will and what makes a person. Driving many of the biblical parallels are two sets of siblings — half-brothers, Charles and Adam Trask, and later, Adam’s fraternal twin sons Cal and Aron — each competing for their father’s attention and love. Disrupting their lives is an enigmatic woman named Cathy Ames, who Adam marries and who gives birth to Cal and Aron.
The book-to-screen adaptation has been Kazan’s passion project. And for a tale of familial legacy, she had her own to confront — in 1955, her grandfather Elia Kazan directed a film version that starred James Dean and covered the last third of the book, which focused on Cal and Aron. Zoe Kazan’s interest in the story took shape decades later when, as a teenager, she discovered the book.
She found herself drawn to Cathy, its famous
She found herself drawn to Cathy, its famous antagonist. “I felt repelled by her, attracted by her, curious about her. I felt empathy. I felt hared. I felt love. I felt all these things,” Kazan said. “I had never read anybody like her. I just remember, every few pages, wanting to stop and read aloud to someone the things that she was doing or [the things] that someone was saying about her.” She also felt the pull of the story’s examination of intergenerational cycles and familial legacy.
“It feels a little bit like a chicken-and-egg situation. Which came first: Was I drawn to this book because of its intergenerational aspects or did this book teach me to think about intergenerational aspects?” Now streaming on Netflix, the seven-part adaptation Kazan shepherded — alongside co-showrunner Jeb Stuart — covers more ground of the multigenerational saga than her grandfather’s film.
This new version also centers Cathy. Here’s what Kazan told us about her vision. Cathy is a character who possibly drove a man to suicide, burned down her house with her parents inside and abandons her sons at birth. Her behavior made her a figure of profound and enigmatic evil in literature. But returning to the book as an adult, Kazan wanted to prod that reputation. The passage Kazan clung to as her guiding principle in her study of Cathy arrives in Chapter 17.
When I said Cathy was a monster,
“When I said Cathy was a monster, it seemed to me that it was so. Now I have bent close with a glass over a small print of her and reread footnotes, and I wonder if it was true. The trouble is that since we cannot know what she wanted, we will never know whether or not she got it. If rather than running toward something, she ran away from something, we can’t know whether she escaped.
Who knows but that she tried to tell someone or everyone what she was like and could not, for lack of a common language. Her life may have been her language, formal, developed, indecipherable. It is easy to say she was bad, but there is little meaning unless we know why.” The series opens with a battered and bloodied Cathy crawling up to the Trask home, setting in motion curiosity about the events leading up to — and after — her arrival.
It’s a seminal moment — arriving in Chapters 10 and 11 in the novel — and the catalyst that ties her to the Trask family. But it wasn’t originally Kazan’s first choice on how to kick off her retelling. “My first instinct was to start it with Adam’s mother’s suicide, which kicks off his relationship to women and longing for love,” Kazan said. “As I wrote the second and third episodes, it became clear that I had to bring Cathy in sooner.
She is the catalytic element in this story
She is the catalytic element in this story. She’s the plot generator. And especially for a modern audience, we need to know that this plot is going to take us somewhere. Dramatists ask themselves: Why is this night unlike any other night? The reason that all of everything else happens in the novel is because Cathy crawls up on this porch, half beaten to death.” In centering Cathy, Kazan reframes the character from a monster and a symbol of pure evil to a young woman carrying the lasting psychological effects of sexual assault.
In Steinbeck’s telling, at 10, Cathy manipulates two neighborhood boys into stripping her, tying her up and beating her so she can frame them for assault. But Kazan’s reading of that moment was an eye-opener when she revisited the text as an adult. And Cathy’s fascination with “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” is tied to that. Lewis Carroll’s fairy tale would serve as a psychological refuge and childhood obsession for Cathy as a young girl, fixating on the idea of drinking a potion to shrink so that no one can see her or reach her.
“To me, as an adult with a lot more understanding of psychology, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s a portrait of disassociation,'” Kazan said. “And connecting that up with the things that happened in her childhood, it felt very clear to me. “When you grow up in a body that is sexualized and targeted, even if you have really protective, wonderful parents, which Cathy Ames does not, it makes you read it differently,” she continued.
When you read about a little girl staging
“When you read about a little girl staging a rape and refusing to … sorry, it makes me emotional … speak out afterwards and not being believed, I understand Steinbeck sees it differently. I cannot help but bring more empathy and understanding to that. When I read Cathy Ames, I read a portrait of a person who has been bifurcated and has decided that in order to survive, she has to carve out different part of herself.” As a supporting character who served as the intellectual heart and emotional anchor, Lee prompted some of “East of Eden’s” most meaningful conversations and questions about identity and responsibility.
He’s a figure not represented in her grandfather’s film, but acknowledging the role Lee played was important to Kazan. Played by Hoon Lee in the series, the character is Adam’s trusted servant who essentially raises his sons after Cathy abandons the family. His story is emblematic of the marginalized experience. Born to parents who were brought from China to build the transcontinental railroad, he’s well-versed in code-switching, feigning broken English to conform to the prejudiced expectations of white society.
He reveals his true self to those he trusts, including Samuel Hamilton. Kazan was a new mother when she began penning her vision and was intrigued by the nurturing instincts displayed by Lee in contrast to Cathy. “I really saw all the labor that he was doing and all the choices he was making with these boys,” she said. “I felt like inside me are two wolves. One is Cathy, one is Lee.
There’s a part of me that wants
There’s a part of me that wants to throw the baby in the well and walk out the door and be free, and there’s a part of me that is showing up every day and wiping their butts and putting food in mouths.” After the Trasks move to Salinas proper, Lee departs for San Francisco to pursue his dream of opening his own bookstore. He returns after six days with little insight into his interlude.
Kazan originally wrote eight episodes, with one dedicated to exploring Lee’s time away. She enlisted novelist Alexander Chee, who wrote the 2001 coming-of-age novel “Edinburgh,” about a Korean American boy living in Maine, to help fill in the blanks. But due to budget reasons, the episode was cut: “Some of his work remains, and it makes the series better,” she said. Timshel, the Hebrew word meaning “thou mayest,” is the philosophical and moral theme driving Steinbeck’s story.
And Kazan wanted that thematic strand woven through every aspect of the story, including when it came to brothers Cal and Aron. The concept is first introduced in Chapter 24 of the book, with Lee discussing the Hebrew translation of Genesis 4:7, the story of Cain and Abel, during a late-night conversation with Adam and Samuel. Kazan said addressing the idea in the series involved many revisions.
To have your character stop in the middle
To have your character stop in the middle of an episode and talk about the etymology of a word in Hebrew — it’s not scintillating material,” Kazan said. “I had to find a way to make it emotional and personal and about character. I worked really hard on the portion where they discuss Cain and Abel in the naming scene that happens in Episode 3. And then when to return to it in Episode 5, when they discuss timshel.
That went through many, many, many revisions to make it as emotional as possible, as connected to character as possible. And honestly, as brief as possible.” Beyond the story’s expansive Central California setting, part of what makes Steinbeck’s saga feel so sprawling is the way it juxtaposes the destinies of two families, the Trasks and the Hamiltons, across multiple decades. The small, troubled Trask family represents isolation, generational trauma and dysfunctional cycles in contrast to the large, loving and morally grounded Hamilton family, who are modeled after Steinbeck’s own maternal ancestors.
The two families both migrate cross country and settle in Salinas Valley but have starkly different experiences that serve as a profound examination of what constitutes success: material or spiritual wealth. But the breadth of the Hamiltons’ story was downsized for the series. Kazan said there wasn’t enough space to give the Irish American family — composed of patriarch and matriarch Samuel and Liza, plus their nine children, the screen time their story merited.
It was very hard for me to let
“It was very hard for me to let go of telling the Hamilton story,” she said. “I would have needed another three episodes and I didn’t have that.” While the scope of the Hamiltons’ story was pared down in the series, it doesn’t ignore their importance — particularly the mentorship from Samuel, an Irish immigrant, inventor and well digger who embodies the virtues of hard work, wisdom and patience.
He is played by Ciarán Hinds in the series. “Sam Hamilton is an incredibly important character on both sides of this story,” Kazan said. “He is one of the agents of change for this family. The story doesn’t exist without him.”
