Heidi Pitlor grew up in Concord, Massachusetts. She got her B.A. from McGill University in Montreal and moved out to Colorado, where in Denver and Boulder she worked as a nanny, receptionist, freelance writer, bus girl, rape crisis counselor and counselor to homeless and runaway teenagers. She moved back to Massachusetts to earn her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Emerson College and worked as a temp at Houghton Mifflin Company. Soon after, she was hired as an editorial assistant in the company's trade division. She eventually became an editor and later a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin (now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). She wrote fiction early in the mornings before work and published her first novel, The Birthdays, in 2006. She has been the series editor of The Best American Short Stories since 2007. Her writing has appeared in such publications as Ploughshares, The Huffington Post, and Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today's Best Women Writers.Here Pitlor shares some casting ideas for an adaptation of The Daylight Marriage, her second novel:
My family likes to ask me to cast my book. I am uncomfortable with this question, mainly because my characters always come to me first as brief, blurry fragments, then thoughts and emotions, then personal histories, and finally souls with physical appearances. I don’t say this to come off as deeper than anyone else. It’s just how my writing process usually works. But acting is, of course, about appearances.Visit Heidi Pitlor's website.
The question also makes me uncomfortable because it assumes or guesses that the book will or may be a movie. I’m thrilled to have my pages made into a book—to me that has always been the end goal. Anything else would be gravy.
But. If I had to, I might say that Edward Norton or Joaquin Phoenix might play Lovell, the husband. Or maybe John Cusack. And for Hannah, the wife? Rachel Weisz? Nicole Kidman? For the teenage girl, Janine, Kiernan Shipka or Chloë Grace Moretz?
The Page 69 Test: The Daylight Marriage.
--Marshal Zeringue