Hanya Yanagihara, author of the acclaimed Man Booker prize-nominated, million-copies-and-counting A Little Life, has been working for years on a screen adaptation. It should be the ultimate box set: epic, engrossing, “right up against the line of melodrama”, as she once described her intention. Yet it has been “pretty much rejected by everyone”, the author said in an interview at the weekend.
Is it because she wanted too much editorial control, she wonders. Or because studios were looking for something more Sex and the City? If you have read it, you will be reeling, of course, at the ridiculousness: who would ever want to take control away from Yanagihara? I would put her in charge of everything. And how on earth could you Sex and the City-fy A Little Life? It would be like trying to make Titus Andronicus more like Friends. If you haven’t read it, I can’t tell you what it’s about, unfortunately: it sounds too harrowing, too much. And if that put you off, I would have ripped 10 or 15 hours of pure pleasure out of your hands for no good reason.
However, for the studio execs red-lighting this, I have only sympathy. It is impossible to adapt truly popular books in a digital age. Unpopular books, difficult books, books that didn’t quite come off, those are all useful jumping-off points. Works that readers become attached to so profoundly that they walk around in T-shirts that list the main characters never get on to the screen without a massive freight of disappointment – all it takes is one guy’s hair to be not how a reader imagined it. Multiply that by a thousand details and a million readers, and you have one billion chances to screw up.
Once upon a time, people would just grumble to themselves in isolation. Fifty Shades of Grey? Nobody admitted to liking it in the first place, and they sure as hell weren’t going to admit to the disappointment of the film coming out like a really long Calvin Klein ad. With A Little Life, the stakes are too huge. And nobody should even think of adapting To Paradise, her new novel, without figuring out what happens at the end.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
