The entry begins:
Writers love to sit around and drink too much cheap wine and cast their favorite actors in the blockbuster movie version of their books. I’ve spent more than one night getting tiddly on Shiraz and casting and recasting everything I’ve ever written, even though in real life, we writers have very little control over it.Read excerpts from The Girl Who Stopped Swimming, and learn more about the author and her books at Joshilyn Jackson's website and blog.
That’s probably a good thing, because I’ve never actually seen a book become a movie. Instead, I’ve seen screenwriters and directors and actors take a book as a springboard and make something all their own out of it. Movies can be directly or distantly related to their book-of-origin, but either way, they are absolutely separate works in a different medium by artists other than the author.
In The Girl Who Stopped Swimming, the main character is Laurel Hawthorne, a thirty-something wife, mother, and art quilter whose placid life explodes into chaos on the night she is visited by the ghost of her 14-year old neighbor, Molly Dufresne. The ghost leads Laurel to the real Molly floating lifelessly in the Hawthorne's backyard pool. No one in Laurel’s whitewashed neighborhood is up to solving the unseemly mystery of Molly’s death. Only her wayward, unpredictable sister, Thalia (who has a few ghosts of her own) is right for the task. But calling in a favor from Thalia is like walking straight into a frying pan protected only by Crisco…
I’ve always said that if Michael Caine wanted to make a movie out of The Girl Who Stopped Swimming and play Laurel as a 60 year old drag queen with a heroin addiction, I would say, “That sounds like a really FRESH direction, Mr. Caine. Write me a check!”
But if they did by chance ask me? I’d cast...[read on]
The Page 69 Test: The Girl Who Stopped Swimming.
My Book, The Movie: The Girl Who Stopped Swimming.
--Marshal Zeringue
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