Mara Williams's "The Truth Is in the Detours," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Truth Is in the Detours: A Novel by Mara Williams.

The entry begins:

I don’t typically imagine actors while I’m drafting my books. I’ve never had a cast at the outset, simply because I visualize the characters as their own, individual people and have a hard time substituting an actor in their place. However, I do picture scenes, landscapes, gestures, and action like cinema, so I am constantly visualizing the book in my head. The Truth Is in the Detours centers around Ophelia, a pink-haired thirty-something virtual assistant whose life is a disaster, and Beau, a successful, uptight academic whose life isn’t as perfect as he’s pretending. I find these two characters incredibly hard to cast, simply because they feel like real people to me. But the book also has a large cast of side characters, who would be incredibly fun to imagine with veteran or character actors. This exercise has confirmed how far Hollywood still needs to go to diversify. When searching to fill a diverse cast of characters with big name actors, the options are more limited.

Scene: Road trip along the West Coast, beginning in San Diego, traveling into the southern California desert, the central and northern coast, and up into southern Oregon.

Ophelia Dahl: Amanda Seyfried. With her ability to shift between comedy and drama seamlessly, she would make a perfect Phe. I could see her playing sassy, prickly, and vulnerable equally well. Also, there’s a long-running Mean Girls joke in the book, and...[read on]

Visit Mara Williams's website.

Q&A with Mara Williams.

The Page 69 Test: The Truth Is in the Detours.

My Book, The Movie: The Truth Is in the Detours.

--Marshal Zeringue