Linda L. Richards's "Endings"

Linda L. Richards is a journalist, photographer and the author of numerous books, including three series of novels featuring strong female protagonists. She is the former publisher of Self-Counsel Press and the founder and publisher of January Magazine.

Here Richards dreamcasts an adaptation of her new novel, Endings:

I had this moment watching the 2021 Oscars when I saw Halle Berry presenting and I felt a wave of recognition. It was like I could see this cool, elegant woman, again reinvented, embodying the nameless anti-heroine at the heart of my new book, Endings. And why? In part it’s because that character is a cipher. An enigma. She is without weight or substance on her own. Yet she dominates the story remarkably. She is everything. And nothing. Berry delivered that quality at the Oscars this year. That cool demeanor. That jaunty new hair cut. You couldn’t help what was going on behind those wonderful eyes.

So okay Berry. Among other things in her career, she was once a Bond girl (Giacinta "Jinx” Johnson in Die Another Day - 2002). So if we’re thinking former Bond girls (and why not?) what about the always wonderful Eva Green from 2006’s Casino Royale? Green played a memorable Vesper Lynd, but are you sensing a theme here? Both of those mentioned are cool-as-a-cucumber actresses now of a certain age. And that certain age thing is salient. Our narrator in Endings is bereft. Adrift. And physically she is only ever identified as being of “middle years” and other words that imply that. We don’t know anything about her physically. The only hint we have that she may be attractive is the effect she has on some of the men she encounters, but we know that, in real life, that quality can be attributed to many things beyond the trim of an ankle.

It’s probably worth mentioning that, when I wrote Endings, I did not have a physical type in mind. A cipher. An enigma. Maybe even I could not see her entirely clearly: just the way she does not want to be seen. I feel that, in the book at any rate, we see her in ways that are beyond the physical. But the movie, if there were to be one? Well, that would be a different thing.

Visit Linda L. Richards's website.

--Marshal Zeringue