Your ending of this season is the same ending as the book.

I thought it was a perfect season-ender for a TV show — the beautiful, dramatic moment of her getting in the van. It’s a frustrating end to a novel, but that’s part of the appeal. It makes you even more invested to know more. And a TV show can end one chapter and start another. Everybody says, “You got to the end of the book!” And I’m like, “No, there’s still a whole bunch of stuff we didn’t even touch.” I read the book a lot. I pick out clues here and there, not so much to alter it, but to say, “O.K., let’s logically extrapolate it.” And that’s where Margaret Atwood has come in so essentially to our conversation. It’s like when you meet the other lunatics who are inpatients at the same asylum you are — the only other people who care about it as much as you do and have gone so deep into thinking about one sentence of the book!

Was there anything you added that wasn’t in the original material, that folks were worried about?

What happens to Ofglen was probably the biggest point of contention and something that had never, as far as we could tell, been depicted on television in exactly that way. Female genital mutilation happens all the time, all over the world, and it is horrifying. The question was, would it be so disturbing that you’d turn off the TV? I had a lot of trepidation about doing it, but it seemed a logical progression to the story. Imagining cruelties for women, though, is not the business we’re in. As Margaret has said, everything in the book is something that’s happened in the world, or is happening now, and we’ve ascribed to that tenet very religiously. We’re not just making up things to be sadistic.

How many seasons do you see the show running?

Well, you know, honestly, when I started, I tried to game out in my head what would ten seasons be like? If you hit a home run, you want energy to go around the bases, you want enough story to keep going, if you can hook the audience to care about these people enough that they’re actually crying at the finale.

You’re in the writers’ room now for Season 2. What do you want to explore?

Aunt Lydia is one of my most fascinating characters. We would like to explore her back story, and what the lives of the aunts are like. The networks between the Marthas. What is the commander doing all day long, and what is his life like? What are his responsibilities?

And the Mayday resistance movement? Rita now has possession of the letters that Moira helped smuggle out for June.