Take Chip Lambert, the struggling writer in Jonathan Franzen’s novel
The Corrections. Having lost his teaching job at a liberal arts college after a wild weekend of sex and drugs with a student, Chip moves to New York, acquires a leather wardrobe, pierces his ears, and gets to work on a revenge screenplay. Endlessly “grooming the corpse of a dramatically dead monologue,” even Chip knows the screenplay is a dog but he nonetheless manages to convince himself that it’s his ticket to fame and fortune. Fortune, first and foremost, because Chip is so deeply in debt that he is reduced to stealing a salmon filet from a ridiculously overpriced downtown market by stuffing it down the front of his pants: “Chip put his hand to his crotch. The dangling filet felt like a cool, loaded diaper.”
In a tweet on March 11, King said she is “truly thrilled” and that she “could not be more excited to be part of this adventure.”
She said “Writers & Lovers” is “a novel about taking big risks and here is Toni Collette making a huge leap with it.”
According to publisher Grove Atlantic, the book is about “a former child golf prodigy [who] now waits tables in Harvard Square and rents a tiny, moldy room at the side of a garage where she works on the novel she’s been writing for six years.”
The description also says the main character, Casey Peabody, “has arrived in Massachusetts in the summer of 1997 without a plan”, has been “blindsided by her mother’s sudden death,” and “she falls for two very different men at the same time.”
Greenlit: Natalie Portman and Lupita Nyong'o Will Star in Apple's 'Lady in the Lake' + More backstage.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from backstage.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Maine writer Lily King lands a movie deal
Released a year ago, her novel Writers & Lovers was a New York Times best-seller.
Share
Maine writer Lily King’s latest novel, about an aspiring novelist who falls in love with two men simultaneously, will be turned into a movie, according to multiple media reports.
Lily King
Photo courtesy of Skidompha Library
Actress Toni Collette will direct the adaptation of “Writers & Lovers,” according to the trade publications Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and other media outlets.
“I have so much respect and awe for Toni Collette and am really excited that she will make her directorial debut with an adaptation of ‘Writers & Lovers,’ ” King wrote in an email. “The book is about taking risks and pursing your ambitions no matter what messages you are getting from the outside world, so it seems fitting she is taking the leap with this project. It has felt right since the first time I spoke with her.”