Brooke Berman
Image credit: Brooke Berman
The writer-director of Ramona at Midlife comes clean on love, loss, and finding creative power in the messiness of midlife.
Brooke Berman doesn’t mince words—she never has. From her early days as a playwright to her latest work as a filmmaker, Berman has always been a storyteller who speaks to the unvarnished truth of modern life. Her debut feature, Ramona at Midlife, is no exception. Premiering on Apple TV and Prime on February 11, 2025, the dark comedy is as raw as it is funny, digging into the uneasy terrain of reinvention, motherhood, and the stories women are often too afraid—or too exhausted—to tell.
The film follows Ramona, a single mother and former literary “It Girl,” whose current, unflattering reality becomes fodder for a rising filmmaker’s new project. As Ramona wrestles with old wounds and broken relationships, she rediscovers her creative power and finds herself ready to define life on her own terms. With Alysia Reiner, Joel De La Fuente, and April Matthis leading a stellar cast, Ramona at Midlife is a comedy about women, work, and the messy, maddening business of figuring it all out.
For Berman, the film is as personal as it is timely. Here, in her own words, she shares the story of her journey—unfiltered, unedited, and all too real.
Image credit: Brooke Berman
WHAT I DID FOR LOVE By Brooke Berman “Things I did in my 20’s for Love: lived on constant financial edge, mostly without my own apartment, worked minimum wage jobs so that I could be available at random hours for classes or rehearsal, ushered for concerts, performances and lectures so that I could attend said events, and mostly, put everything on hold – boyfriends, social life, family – to focus on my one true love, The Theater. While my high school friends were working to get into law school, my “theater friends” and I were living lean to “make our work.” Art was our one true love.
And for the most part, it paid off. Although my actual love life was a joke, and not just because I fell in love with actors, I was fulfilled (mostly) by art. When lovers let me down, a tribe of theater artists always had my back. Marsha Norman, one of my mentors, put it adeptly: “If you’re a writer, relationships with men are complicated at best.” I put my trust in the work. Although I was often searingly lonely and achingly poor, I became the person I’d always wanted to be, a theater artist.
Around this time, I was dismayed to hear a male colleague announce that he was “in it to win it.” What did that mean, I wondered? What was there to win in Off-Broadway Theater? Up until this moment, I believed that my colleagues and I were on equal ground and that every one of us was in this admittedly unprofitable field because of our great devotion to Art. Where love is involved, does not every poet and sage urge us to give selflessly, hearts open, without expectation? Yes, this is what kills The Giving Tree. But still, Silverstein urged, give anyway!
Image credit: Brooke Berman
“Can you believe him!?” I asked a mutual friend. “Yes,” she said, “He’s going to win.”
And he did. He moved to L.A. for a TV job. He did, and continues to do, very well. Although he no longer writes play, he makes a great living. Everyone says “He’s killing it.”
I also moved to LA. I sold a movie and moved West seeking not fame and fortune but a Joni Mitchell song: canyons, magic, stardust. I met my husband, and we fell in love fast. We rented a cute two-bedroom in Echo Park. We adopted a cat and had a baby. And I wrote.
I attempted to straddle writing and mothering but missed my life in the theater. I was making a living writing movies (and rewriting other people’s movies) but found myself on the sofa at night watching Gossip Girl in tears. Yes, I was awash in new mom hormones (and also Blair Waldorf had troubles). But mainly, I missed New York. I missed Theater People. I missed the coffee shop on Vernon Avenue that Gossip Girl kept insisting was Brooklyn but I knew as Long Island City, Queens. By the time my son was ready to start school, I announced that I too was ready – to move back to the city we’d left.
Image credit: Brooke Berman
That’s when things got funky. To my great dismay, after moving “back home” my LA-based agents dropped me. My tribe seemed to drop me too, no longer inviting me to parties, readings, performances and gatherings. I was different. My hours were different. No longer at every single performance or waiting for them when their shows let out, I was home with my kid. I felt like a lonely loser.
Which is when I remembered In It To Win It! Maybe he was onto something? After all, the Victorian ideal is unrealistic, and those heroines mostly ended up dead. Had I been living by the wrong code?
Maybe. But as Lauryn Hill sang, how you gonna win when you ain’t right within? For me, maybe for me, love was winning?
I had been in development with a movie for six years when the pandemic came along and shut it down. Shuttered at home, my writer husband and I traded off three-hour shifts: overseeing remote school for our son, writing, and satisfying our freelance gigs. During “my time” I mostly stared at an empty notebook wondering … now what?
Image credit: Brooke Berman
Then Ramona showed up, ready to tell me her story. I wrote the first draft between April and September of 2020 and vowed to make the film. Determined, I attended workshops and webinars, called on favors, raised money and asked everyone I could for their advice. A year later, we were in production. An adult who no longer conflated romance (or salvation) with work, what I did for love changed. Instead of giving myself away, without waiting for permission or asking to be seen, I made something and invited others to join me. I became we; and we made a movie.
In the final scene of Ramona at Midlife, our heroine muses, “Maybe this is winning.” Her messy imperfect life is enough. And maybe winning is something we do together.”
Ramona at Midlife is now available for pre-order on the iTunes store and will stream on Apple TV and Prime starting February 11, 2025. Pre-order the film here.