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 

• The advice that helped Lally stop wasting her childbearing years with the wrong person 

• Meeting the man who would become her husband and marrying him in Las Vegas three months later 

• Miscarriage, motherhood and wanting both creative fulfilment and family 

• Turning heartbreak into art and why writing everything down became a survival mechanism 

At its heart, My Cursed Vagina is not really about sex, psychics or even bad relationships. It is about the universal desire to be loved, the private stories women build around that longing, and what happens when a woman stops apologising for wanting everything: love, work, sex, art, adventure, children and purpose. 

If you have ever stayed too long, loved too hard, overanalysed a text message, mistaken pain for passion, or wondered whether everyone else has somehow figured relationships out before you, this episode will hit home. 

Listen now to You’re Gonna Want To Hear This with Lally Katz. 

My Cursed Vagina by Lally Katz is out now. 

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https://www.marieclaire.com.au/life/youre-gonna-want-to-hear-this-podcast/ 

Credits: 

Host: Marie Claire Editor Georgie McCourt 

Edited by Charlie Potter 

Supervising Producer Leah Porges

Head of Vodcasting Rachel Fountain 

Learn More: You're Gonna Want to Hear This is a production of Marie Claire and Are Media.