The entry begins:
Given that I think very cinematically when I write, and have always assigned the roles of my characters to actors and pinned their pictures all over my office (very reminiscent of my young teenage years when posters of David Cassidy were on my ceiling), this is a pretty easy one for me.Visit Megan Chance's website.
More than that, for this book in particular, I had movies on the brain before I even started writing. A Dangerous Education is a story of a teacher who must come to terms with her own wayward past as she tangles with a dangerous clique at a boarding school for rebellious girls of influential families—and all of this during the repressive era of the 1950s, McCarthyism and the Cold War. I wanted the novel to have a similar feeling to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Picnic at Hanging Rock, not just the novels, but the movies made from them. I wanted dangerous, illicit, creepy, sensual—feelings often associated with girls’ adolescence. I’d also seen the Amazon series based on Picnic at Hanging Rock, with Natalie Dormer, and I wanted that feeling too, that propulsive malice.
Rosemary Chivers is angry, vulnerable, and struggling against the repressiveness of the curriculum she’s supposed to teach, I wanted a strong woman unafraid to say what she thinks and often getting in trouble because of that. Also someone with a sense of humor, because that particular woman in the 1950s would have to have one. When I watched...[read on]
My Book, The Movie: A Splendid Ruin.
The Page 69 Test: A Splendid Ruin.
Q&A with Megan Chance.
The Page 69 Test: A Dangerous Education.
My Book, The Movie: A Dangerous Education.
--Marshal Zeringue
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