When Mary Bronstein’s daughter was seven years old, she became sick. At the time, the writer-director had no choice but to travel from New York to San Diego — the only place where her daughter could get the necessary long-term treatment. While Bronstein’s husband (director and screenwriter Ronald Bronstein) remained back in New York, she and her daughter took up residence in a tiny, austere motel room. Doctors told her treatment would take six weeks — eight, max. But as two months stretched into eight, Bronstein felt herself slipping.

“I’d be in this motel room, in bed, staring at the ceiling,” Bronstein tells Rolling Stone on a call from her home in New York. “I started going into the bathroom and closing the door, and that’s where I could have my space at night, which was quite depres

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