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I’m always excited and wary when a book I love is adapted for the screen.
This might be a Surprising Take considering a recent newsletter re: Wuthering Heights, but I had no dog in that fight as I have no special affection for the source material. But when I do love the original book, it changes the stakes.
I’m not just talking about the classics either: I loved Rufi Thorpe’s 2024 novel Margo’s Got Money Troubles, about a down-on-her-luck young woman who is unemployed, about to get evicted and, oh yeah, has a new baby. She decides to enlist the help of her father, a former pro wrestler, in her own performance career on OnlyFans. The television adaptation, starring Elle Fanning, Nick Offerman and Michelle Pfeiffer, arrives on AppleTV today.
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I haven’t seen it yet — this workday has to hurry up and end — but screen adaptations raise a question: should you read the book first?
I’m in camp Most Of The Time, Yes. Not because I think the book is always necessarily better (though, in a great many cases, it is), but because I like seeing how someone else’s brain interprets a work. It takes the written word out of my imagination and allows me to engage with it as a viewer. I like to see casting decisions and if they align with how I imagined the characters, and I like seeing what changed, what got left out, what they got “right” (to me) and what they got “wrong” (to me).
But mostly it’s because I don’t like reading the book after. I don’t like imagining the actors — that’s why I hate those tie-in covers; I read Bridget Jones’s Diary (one of my all-timers) before seeing the movie (which, happily, I also love) and my book cover had Renée Zellweger on it, so that’s who I pictured while reading it.
I guess I want to give my imagination the first pass, you know?
The wariness part of the anticipation equation, though, is interesting to me. I think sometimes we get oddly protective of things we love and we think other people will “ruin” that thing because it’s our thing.
I mean, I get it: I was actively worried Lena Dunham was going to “ruin” Catherine, Called Birdy, a true gem of a children’s novel by Karen Cushman that is written as a diary of a 13-year-old girl growing up in 13th-century England. (If you’ve never read it, read it. I don’t care how old you are. It’s hilarious.)
Dunham’s adaptation was good, honestly, because it’s clear she loved the book, too. But even if it wasn’t, she can’t ruin it: I read the book first.
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