Here Willett shares some insight into casting an adaptation of Winner of the National Book Award:I'd love to see Winner of the National Book Award as a movie.Learn more about the book and author at Jincy Willett's website.
Abigail and Dorcas Mather are fraternal twins living in Rhode Island. Dorcas is virginal, slender, acerbic; she's the head librarian at Squanto. Her sister is plump, sexually voracious, amoral; she kills her husband and becomes a feminist icon. Dorcas narrates the novel as she waits for an imminent hurricane and reads a bestseller her sister has written, a largely false memoir about her travails as an abused wife.I know Abigail better than anyone else in the world, and if I were asked to explain this or that particular thing, I could probably give a fairly accurate account of her motivations. I can report that duty has never played an even minor part in her decisions; that she is moved solely by the desire for pleasure and the avoidance of pain; that she derives pleasure from an astonishing variety of sources, and pain from astonishingly few; and so on. I can even predict her behavior, with a respectable success rate.Abigail would ideally be played by Cynthia Ettinger, who can definitely play bawds. She was particularly wonderful in Carnivàle.
"But I don't understand her at all. To understand you have to do more than predict and explain. You must feel some degree of empathy. I have a greater understanding of cats and internal combustion engines and Iranians than I do of my twin sister Abigail.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
