While most movie-going audiences familiar with author Nick Hornby know him best for seeing his own written works turned into films (like High Fidelity, Fever Pitch, and About a Boy), the writer has recently begun adapting other authors’ books into screenplays. We know, it’s a bit complicated. Hornby notably penned the screenplay for An Education, based on Lynn Barber’s memoir, and recently finished the script for Brooklyn, which is based on a Colm Toibin novel. Next up, Hornby will adapt another memoir for the big screen, turning his talents to Cheryl Strayed‘s “Wild,” a tome that Strayed wrote about her soul-saving 1,100-mile solo hike up the Pacific Crest Trail.
Reese Witherspoon‘s production company, Pacific Standard, will produce the project, and Witherspoon is also expected to star. Witherspoon also personally drafted Hornby for the film, telling Deadline that “Nick’s innate blend of humanity and humor are a perfect match for Cheryl’s raw emotional memoir.” Hornby was just as filled as praise, commenting that he “loved Cheryl Strayed’s memoir. It’s moving, funny, painful and brave, and the moment I’d finished it I wanted someone to let me have a go at adapting it, because it was clear to me that it could make a wonderful movie. I’m thrilled to be given the chance; the fact that this chance was given to me by Reese Witherspoon, a great actress who feels exactly the same way about the book as I do, makes this project all the more exciting.” What a lovefest!
ComingSoon rustled up the book’s official synopsis and a nifty trailer (trailers for books! what a world!) for the memoir, both of which you can check out after the break.
A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again. At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she’d lost everything when her mother died young of cancer. Her family scattered in their grief, her marriage was soon destroyed, and slowly her life spun out of control. Four years after her mother’s death, with nothing more to lose, Strayed made the most impulsive decision of her life: to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State—and to do it alone. She had no experience as a long-distance hiker–indeed, she’d never gone backpacking before her first night on the trail. Her trek was little more than “an idea, vague and outlandish and full of promise.” But it was a promise of piecing back together a life that had come undone. Strayed faces down rattlesnakes and black bears, intense heat and record snowfalls, and both the beauty and intense loneliness of the trail. Told with great suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild vividly captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.
So, you’re saying it has a happy ending?