Zoe Kazan Gives Steinbeck’s Monster, Cathy Ames, a Childhood

Netflix’s seven-part East of Eden, written by Zoe Kazan and starring Florence Pugh, puts Cathy Ames at the centre of John Steinbeck’s novel and asks what happened to her before she started killing people. Seventy-one years ago, Kazan’s grandfather Elia filmed the same book.

By Teona Abuladze · 6 min read

In chapter eight of East of Eden, John Steinbeck stops the story to make an announcement. “I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents,” he writes, and then he introduces Cathy Ames. Pretty face. Small hands and feet. Something missing inside. Over the next four hundred pages she sets fire to her parents’ house with them in it, shoots her husband, abandons her newborn twins and ends up running the most vicious brothel in Salinas.

Zoe Kazan read that chapter at fifteen, on a Steinbeck road trip up the California coast with her parents, the screenwriters Nicholas Kazan and Robin Swicord. “I was repulsed by her, and compelled by her, and attracted to her, and curious about her all at once,” she has said. She also told TIME that she was “such a good girl” that reading Cathy “felt very exciting.”

She is 43 now. On 1 October Netflix released her seven-episode adaptation, which she created, wrote and ran with the veteran screenwriter Jeb Stuart. Florence Pugh plays Cathy. In Kazan’s version, Cathy narrates.

After her first child was born, Kazan did something she now calls embarrassing. She asked her agents: “If the rights to East of Eden ever come up, can you put my name forward?”

The call came in December 2019, while she was shooting in Australia. She flew back to Los Angeles with her 15-month-old to pitch it. She told TIME the pitch was about “America and the way that we don’t want to look at our shadow.” She started writing in 2020, wrote eight episodes, and Netflix ordered seven. The novelist Alexander Chee helped her build out the scenes of Lee, the Chinese American servant who is the moral centre of the book. Filming ran from October 2024 to March 2025 in New Zealand, around Auckland, Dunedin and Oamaru, standing in for the Salinas Valley.

“I’ve worked on this for six years and thought about it for 20 years before that,” she told W.

The grandfather problem

Every interview gets to it eventually. In 1955 Elia Kazan directed East of Eden with James Dean as Cal. It covered only the last third of the novel and pushed Cathy, by then called Kate, into a few scenes as a hard-faced madam. Jo Van Fleet played her, in her first film role, and won the Oscar for best supporting actress. The make-up department had to age her up because she looked too young.

Three years before that film, in 1952, Elia Kazan went before the House Un-American Activities Committee and named names. His granddaughter was 20 when he died in 2003. She never talked to him about the book and had not seen his film when she first read it. She watched it again only in June 2024, on a plane to New Zealand to scout locations, and found it “less like the book than I remembered.”

“I still want my grandpa to be my grandpa,” she told TIME, “and not have access to all of this adult stuff.” To the Washington Post she put it more firmly: “My love for this book is separate from my grandfather’s relationship to it.”

It plainly isn’t completely separate, and she knows it. A novel about fathers, sons and what gets passed down, adapted by the third generation of a Hollywood family, invites the obvious reading. She said as much: “The irony was not lost on me.”

“If we think of Cathy as being not human, then we don’t learn anything about ourselves.”

What she changed about Cathy

The major change comes early. In the novel, the child Cathy is caught in a barn with two older boys, and Steinbeck makes it clear that she arranged it and that the boys are punished for her scheme. Kazan reread it as an adult and saw something else. “What I saw was a portrait of dissociation,” she told TVLine. In the series it is an assault. Cathy’s father becomes openly abusive, which makes her decision to kill him legible, if no less horrifying.

Kazan is careful about what this does and doesn’t mean. “I don’t think Cathy Ames is a feminist,” she told W, and to TIME: “I don’t like historical fiction that imposes modern values on the past.” She calls Cathy “irredeemable, irresistible, and so full of agency.” Variety headlined its interview with her by calling Cathy both a “murderer” and a “survivor.” Kazan wants both words to stand.

The brothel years were the other test. “When we first approached Florence, I was very clear that this is a person who becomes a sex worker,” Kazan said. “I wanted to put it on screen as work, not as an objectification of her body or something scintillating.” Martha Plimpton plays Faye, the madam Cathy charms and then poisons.

Kazan has said she needed an actress who could bring empathy “without softening all of that character’s edges.” She first saw Pugh in Midsommar, and she compares the experience to how Karl Malden, a family friend, used to describe seeing Brando on stage. It “erased any jealousy.” Pugh is also a producer on the series.

Pugh’s own summary is blunter. “She’s not just evil. She’s not just bad. She’s not just a monster.” The line I keep returning to is quieter: Cathy is “always trying to find her next breathing spot.”

Why it matters that a woman made this

Steinbeck wrote Cathy in 1951 as a test of his central idea, timshel, the Hebrew word Lee translates as “thou mayest”: the belief that people can choose good. Everyone in the book gets that choice except her. She’s the control experiment, born broken so the men around her can be free.

Kazan’s version gives Cathy the same choice as everyone else, and Cathy keeps choosing badly. That’s a harder story than the one Steinbeck wrote. It also asks more of the audience. A monster lets you off the hook. A woman who was hurt, who learned that money and secrets were the only protection available to a woman in 1900, and who then poisoned someone, doesn’t.

Kazan quoted a line she found in Steinbeck’s own notes for the novel: people will hate Cathy “not because she is foreign, but because she is familiar.” She thinks he knew more than his narrator admits.

The case against

Not everyone is convinced the new backstory helps. Lacy Baugher at RogerEbert.com loved Pugh, “mesmerizing as Cathy, removed, scheming and furious by turns,” but found the rest of the series “pale and underbaked in her absence.” She called Adam, Cathy’s husband, “largely a cipher.” The Hamilton family, Steinbeck’s own ancestors and half the novel, mostly didn’t survive the cut. Kazan admits that hurt. “There were really difficult things to let go of,” she told TheWrap, and some episodes went to Netflix in fifteen versions.

The deeper objection is about trauma as an explanation. In Salon, Melanie McFarland points to Elizabeth Bruenig’s warning in The Atlantic, written about a real murder trial, that a trauma narrative can make the killer “the star of her own murder trial” and blur what she did. McFarland’s verdict on Cathy: her reasons “may be understandable,” but “the transgression remains unforgivable.” TV Fanatic thought the finale pushed “too hard for sympathy” with its childhood imagery.

Kazan herself found the novel’s last act “a little bit underdeveloped,” so she rebuilt it around Cathy’s guilt toward her son Aron. Whether that remorse is earned or wished for is the argument this series will start in every house that watches it. Critics are mostly on her side for now: 88 percent on Rotten Tomatoes from 57 reviews.

Kazan’s last line on the subject, to W: “I feel like I’ve been borrowing the book, and now it’s time to return it to the library.”

East of Eden is streaming on Netflix: seven episodes, about seven hours. The 1955 film and the 1981 ABC miniseries, where Jane Seymour won a Golden Globe for her Cathy, are worth watching afterwards, to see how differently three generations of television and film have handled the same woman.

Teona Abuladze is the founder and editor of Shansi Magazine.

The series depicts sexual violence and abuse. If you need support, RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Hotline is available 24/7 at 1-800-656-4673.

Sources: Netflix Tudum — https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/east-of-eden-series ; Wikipedia, East of Eden (2026 miniseries) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_of_Eden_(2026_miniseries) ; TIME, Zoe Kazan interview, 16 September 2026 — https://time.com/article/2026/09/16/zoe-kazan-east-of-eden-netflix/ ; W Magazine — https://www.wmagazine.com/culture/east-of-eden-netflix-zoe-kazan-florence-pugh-interview ; The Washington Post, via The Spokesman-Review — https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2026/oct/03/east-of-eden-is-a-tale-of-familial-legacy-to-tell-/ ; TheWrap — https://www.thewrap.com/creative-content/tv-shows/east-of-eden-netflix-florence-pugh-zoe-kazan-interview/ ; TVLine — https://www.tvline.com/2279721/florence-pugh-cathy-netflix-east-of-eden-central-character-explained/ ; Variety, Kazan on the ending — https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/east-of-eden-explained-ending-cathy-lee-sexuality-1236897001/ ; Motion Picture Association — https://www.motionpictures.org/?p=90300 ; Mamamia — https://www.mamamia.com.au/east-of-eden-florence-pugh-interview/ ; RogerEbert.com review — https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/east-of-eden-netflix-tv-review-2026 ; Salon, Melanie McFarland — https://www.salon.com/2026/10/03/netflixs-east-of-eden-asks-if-weve-misread-its-monster/ ; TV Fanatic — https://www.tvfanatic.com/east-of-eden-season-1-spoilers-review-the-trouble-with-being-the-good-son-florence-pugh/ ; Rotten Tomatoes — https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/east_of_eden_2026/s01 ; University of the Pacific, Jo Van Fleet — https://www.admissions.pacific.edu/pacific-newsroom/pacifics-largely-forgotten-oscar-winner-made-impact-screen ; Wikipedia, East of Eden (1981 miniseries) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_of_Eden_(1981_miniseries)