"It rooted slowly but firmly, like all "cult classics." It wasn't so much the story of her abusive childhood and the liberation she found in sex and substances, swimming, and writing as it was a polemic against the notion of a fixed past. Its emphatic embrace of subjective experience-celebrating a certain ownership and reframing of your own history-over static, objective fact made it a kind of guide. Words to live by."
"The most famous convert might be Kristen Stewart, who's been working to adapt the book as a movie for nearly a decade. The actor has had an impressive run since her Twilight days, with celebrated performances in indies, like Kelly Reichardt's Certain Women, and more artistically inclined mainstream films, playing Princess Di in Pablo Larraín's 2021 Spencer. But for her first turn behind the camera, Stewart has said she was waiting for a "starting gun," one she found in Yuknavitch's work."
"For all that it is, Yuknavitch's memoir is not an obvious pick for adaptation. Unlike another landmark Oregon author's memoir, there is no Pacific Crest Trail guiding its narrative. Instead, the book is remarkable for the way it captures embodied consciousness, the beautiful, incongruous mess of being alive-though it's probably just a regular mess in the eyes of most Hollywood execs."
A 2011 cultural phenomenon rooted like a cult classic by privileging subjective experience and reframing personal history over fixed, objective fact. The work foregrounds embodied consciousness, sexual and substance liberation, swimming, and creative practice as modes of survival and self-definition, presenting a beautiful, incongruous mess of being alive. An acclaimed actor pursued a cinematic adaptation for nearly a decade, reportedly contacting the originator forty pages into a first reading and treating the material as a starting gun. The actor resisted industry pressures, dug in her heels, and even threatened to quit the business to protect the adaptation's integrity.
Read at Portland Monthly
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]