Joan Didion has been enjoying a sizable comeback in both the literary and pop culture worlds ever since We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, documentary about the author, quickly smashed its Kickstarter crowdfunding goal and her subsequent appearance in the latest Céline fashion campaign spread across the internet. Her popular essay “Goodbye To All That”—the culminating piece in her collection Slouching Toward Bethlehem—is now being optioned by producers Megan Carlson and Brian Sullivan as the first project for their company Carlson Sullivan Pictures LLC, Deadline reports.
The essay artfully chronicles Didion’s life in New York in her 20s and spans the time until she and her newly-wed husband John Gregory Dunne moved to Los Angeles in 1964, at which point she would begin her long and successful writing career. Didion started as a staff writer at Vogue before moving on to become one of the most prolific American essayists, novelists, and screenwriters of the twentieth century. Besides Goodbye To All That, her novel The Book of Common Prayer is also in the process of receiving a film treatment through producer Campbell Scott.
Sullivan has put in a lot of work to get this project on its feet, revealing:
It’s been a dream of mine for years to bring this essay to the screen. I tried to option it as a student when I was at the San Francisco Art Institute and was turned down. It has been a part of my being for 40 years, and then the planets aligned and here we are. The moment has come for ‘Goodbye To All That.’
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