Heather Young's "The Lost Girls," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Lost Girls by Heather Young.

The entry begins:

Whenever my friends ask, “So when’s your book going to be a movie?” I laugh and shake my head. “Not gonna be a movie,” I say. I can’t imagine how a screenwriter could turn my book, with its interwoven narratives set sixty years apart, into a coherent, two-hour story. It took me six years, 352 pages, and a Beautiful-Mind-level whiteboard to fit it all together, and it still feels like the baling wire and safety pins will fall out at any minute and spill the whole mess onto the floor. To put it bluntly, it just doesn’t seem like movie material.

But…what if, say, Reese Witherspoon were to read The Lost Girls? She loves turning literary novels into movies, and she did tell the Wall Street Journal she’s “on a crusade to find a dynamic, female character, whether she’s likable or not.” If there’s one thing The Lost Girls has plenty of, it’s dynamic, borderline-unlikeable female characters.

There’s Lucy, who as an 11-year-old in 1935 sells her loyalty at a horrible price that ruins three lives, then blames the whole situation on everyone but herself for the next six decades. She was dealing with some difficult shit, and she eventually comes to appreciate the enormity of what she did, but still -- she’s complicated, at the very least. She’d need to be played by a nuanced young actress who can be sympathetic even while doing questionable things, like...[read on]

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The Page 69 Test: The Lost Girls.

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My Book, The Movie: The Lost Girls.

--Marshal Zeringue