IT'S TIME FOR HOLLYWOOD TO PUT ASIDE CHILD-ISH THINGS

In April of this year, Helen Rosner of The New Yorker published an essay called “Julia Child Gets Sliced and Diced for a New Era of Television,” in which she explored the variety of new Julia Child-related media projects that have recently hit the airwaves. She wrote:

Almost everyone, by now, knows the gist of this story. There have been biographies, anthologies, documentaries, special issues of magazines, children’s books, blogs, “S.N.L.” homages, and her kitchen—not a replica, the real thing—was installed in the Smithsonian. Plus, of course, there was a big, glossy movie: “Julie & Julia,” from 2009, in which Meryl Streep was at her Meryl Streepiest, embodying Child’s idiosyncratic allure. And now, for those who haven’t yet had their fill, there is a big, glossy television show, streaming on HBO Max. Titled simply “Julia,” it is a scripted series that concerns itself with the early days of Child’s television career, after she and Paul left the O.S.S., and settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts…Julia Child superfans affronted by the liberties that “Julia” takes will find something more straightforwardly hagiographic on basic cable. In “The Julia Child Challenge,” a culinary competition that débuted on the Food Network in March, Child is brought back to viewers as a game-show host. Through clever editing of her television footage, the series’ creators have Child preside over an elimination-style reality show from a massive projection screen, like the Great and Powerful Oz in a chambray apron.

In 2021, directors Julie Cohen and Betsy West brought out a documentary on the life of Julia Child, which is available for streaming on HBO Max. The streaming service has already approved a second season of the TV series Julia, which is expected to be available for viewers sometime next spring.

I have always liked Julia Child, and my mother was a big fan, but I believe her cultural influence has been exaggerated a great deal. Unlike many of the big-name cookbook authors of our era – Emeril Lagasse, Bobby Flay, Mario Batali, etc. – she was never a restaurant owner, nor even a restaurant chef. She didn’t pioneer a new style of cooking, nor did she invent many recipes. Her truest culinary heir is probably Sara Moulton, a protégé of Julia’s who worked in restaurant kitchens for about five years but has spend most of her career teaching, writing, and appearing on food programs, much like her mentor. And no one is clamoring for a Sara Moulton biopic. As a food writer, Child was not an impressive stylist such as MFK Fisher or Elizabeth David. Her fame rests almost entirely upon her TV show The French Chef, which ran on public television stations in America from 1963 to 1973, and which has been shown in reruns almost perpetually since then. The show was very low-tech, even for its era. It rarely featured any guest stars. Its success derived almost exclusively from Child’s quirky and totally relatable on-air personality. She was so smart and witty and talented, that it was a joy to spend time with her. But I don’t believe that she revolutionized American cooking in any serious sense. Every American town with a population of more than a few thousand has multiple Mexican restaurants, Italian restaurants, Chinese restaurants, and Indian restaurants. Few American towns have an abundance of French restaurants. It has been noted that New York City has more French restaurants than any other city in the world except Paris. Likewise, Los Angeles is believed to have more Mexican restaurants than any city outside of Mexico. The difference, however, is that Mexican restaurants abound outside of L.A. You’ll find them not only across the American southwest but also in Portland, Oregon, in Seattle Washington, St. Paul, Minnesota, and just about every other American town. For the most part, French restaurants, like Napa’s The French Laundry, are found in close proximity to the wealthy. It was always thus, and Julia didn’t manage to change the situation. Like most Julia Child fans of her generation, my mother never even attempted to reproduce one of Julia’s classic French meals. After watching Julia prepare a delicate dish like Veal Prince Orloff, my mother would go into the kitchen and whip up sloppy joes for dinner, or a tuna casserole. So few Americans actually tried to recreate Julia’s dishes that, in 2002, when a food blogger named Julie Powell actually attempted to reproduce all 524 recipes in Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking books, she created a minor sensation (albeit one disliked by Julia herself), which led to a bestselling book and the abovementioned Nora Ephron film starring Meryl Streep.

Julia Child’s story is interesting but it is hardly a rags-to-riches tale. It’s essentially a riches-to-more-riches tale. She was born in one of America’s wealthiest cities, Pasadena, California, which is currently home to Meryl Streep (who paid $3.6 million for her home), Kristen Wiig ($2.96 million), Mandy Moore ($2.6 million), Rachel Bilson ($3.25 million), and many other fabulously wealthy celebrities.

If HBO Max and other streaming services want to go on putting out new Julia Child-themed programming every few months, they are welcome to do so. But the past hundred years or so have produced so many female writers with interesting back-stories that it seems a shame to spend any more effort milking Julia Child’s biography for streaming content. I hope the programming chiefs at HBO and elsewhere will allow me to recommend a few female authors whose lives and accomplishments are every bit as worthy of exploration as Julia Child’s. Here are a few suggestions:

If you want to stick with a culinary theme, how about greenlighting a TV series about Alice Waters, a much more substantial American chef than Julia Child? Born in 1944, she opened her highly influential Berkeley, CA, restaurant Chez Panisse in 1971 at the tender age of 27. Waters practically invented the California Cuisine movement. She is the author of a dozen or more books and has won numerous culinary prizes. She was a student at Berkeley in the 1960s and was active in the free speech movement. Like Julia Child, her politics have always been reliably liberal. She is still very much alive and active in the culinary world. Her life and work scream out for a TV miniseries.

Another Bay Area literary legend worthy of a miniseries is Alice Walker. Not only does her name sound similar to Alice Waters’s, the two women were born just a few months apart in early 1944. Alice Walker is likely to be the last Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose parents were sharecroppers. Nowadays, most Pulitzers go to graduates of elite universities, the majority of whom seem to come from solidly upper-middle-class backgrounds. An African-American born in rural Georgia before the Civil Rights era, Walker’s early life was full of the kinds of hardships that make for dramatic storytelling – segregated schools, an illegal abortion, an accidental shooting that left her permanently blind in one eye. But eventually her hard work and talent paid off. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1965 and went on to hugely successful career as a writer of novels, poems, and memoirs. Her story is complicated by recent evidence of an anti-Semitic streak in her thinking. In today’s media climate, where hypersensitivity to anything having to do with race seems to dictate broadcasting norms, it’s hard to imagine HBO or Showtime producing a sympathetic portrait of Alice Walker. But her story – warts and all – would make for fascinating viewing.

As long as we are highlighting authors named Alice, how about a miniseries on the life of Alice Sheldon, a groundbreaking science fiction author better known by her masculine pseudonym James Tiptree Jr.? The winner of numerous Hugo and Nebula Awards for her stories and novellas, Sheldon’s life was nearly as interesting as her fiction. Her father (a lawyer and naturalist) and mother (a fiction writer) were so prominent in their chosen fields that they both have Wikipedia entries of their own. Like Alice Walker, Sheldon attended Sarah Lawrence (but didn’t graduate), and like Alice Waters she spent some time living and attending classes in Berkeley, CA. She eventually earned a BA from American University and a PhD from George Washington University. Her life and career took many dramatic turns even before she attained literary success. She was a supply officer in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corp (the WAACs) and later, during World War II, she worked, like Julia Child, in military intelligence (Child also applied for inclusion in the WAACs but was rejected for being too tall). She didn’t publish her first work of fiction until 1968, at the age of 53. Her writing career lasted only 19 years, but it was one of science-fiction’s most significant and interesting. She made no public appearances in support of her writing and, for much of her career, even her editors and publishers were unaware that James Tiptree Jr. was actually a woman. In May of 1987 she murdered her husband and then took her own life (they were both ill, and these were essentially mercy killings). Her life practically screams out for a biopic.

Before we leave behind the name Alice entirely, let’s consider the wildly dramatic life and career of Beatrice Sparks, the writer behind the iconic 1971 YA bestseller Go Ask Alice. Born into abject poverty, Sparks was both a devout Mormon and, essentially, a professional con-woman. The “diaries” of troubled teens that she specialized in finding and polishing, were, for the most part, fictions wholly invented by her. Most of her books depict a teenager coming under the influence of a pernicious social ill – drugs, heavy drinking, Satanism, Dungeons & Dragons, sex with an untrustworthy adult, etc. – and then falling into a downward spiral that eventually leads to death. She could be a scold and a prude, but she also appears to have warned a lot of teenagers away from abusive behaviors. The first streaming service to dramatize Sparks’s life is likely to have a huge hit on its hands. Gillian Jacobs, a gifted actress and longtime fan of Go Ask Alice, would be a great choice for the leading role.

Norma Klein was the anti-Beatrice Sparks. During the same period in which Sparks was writing fake YA novels, Klein was writing real ones. Like Sparks’s books, almost all of Klein’s novels deal with problematic subject matter, often relating to sex. In My Life as a Body (1987), high school senior Augie Lloyd is hired by the wealthy parents of her classmate Sam Feldman to tutor him in advance of his college placement exams. Sam was left permanently wheelchair-bound after a car accident a year earlier. Prior to the accident, he was a sexually active athlete who had no trouble finding beautiful girlfriends. Now, his disability has left him without a sex life. Eventually, Augie, a virgin who has always been socially awkward, will become the student and Sam the tutor as he introduces her to the ways of the flesh. Meanwhile, Augie’s best friend, Claudia, enters into a lesbian relationship with one of her teachers. That’s fairly typical for a Klein novel. Her female protagonists generally find themselves having sex that is ill-advised for various reasons – the man is much older, the boy may possibly be her biological brother, etc. But, while the sex in a Beatrice Sparks novel always turns negative quickly, in Klein’s books, sex – even bad sex – is rarely that big of a deal. The parents in her novels are often preternaturally progressive, getting their fourteen-year-old daughters fitted for IUDs when they learn that they are having sex with their sixteen-year-old boyfriends. Whereas Sparks’s narrators tend to write drearily about sex (“Another day, another blowjob.”), Klein’s often write rapturously about it (“Even as Sam began kissing my breasts and sucking on my nipples, I felt only exultant, as though I were on a high-diving board, having just leaped into the air, heading for the water, about to do a perfect swan dive.” And: “An hour later I was lying in Sam’s bed, entangled with him in a euphoric daze.”) Klein’s sex-positive books have often been listed among the titles most frequently banned from school libraries (ironically, this is true of Sparks’s sex-negative books too). Sex, alcohol, and drugs almost always lead to death in Sparks’s works. In Klein’s fictive world, they are often just a speed bump on the way to adulthood. Sparks was a devout Mormon and a Utahan who lived to a ripe old age (95). Klein was a secular Jew and New Yorker who died much too young at the age of fifty. But both women would make fascinating subjects for a TV bio-series. After all, nobody ever banned a Julia Child book from a library. Zosia Mamet would be a good choice for the leading role in a Klein biopic.

What Julia Child attempted to do for the American meal (i.e. elevate it to a fine art), Judith Martin, alias Miss Manners, attempted to do for American manners. Both women largely failed in their epic quests. America is more obese than ever, and junk food makes up an appalling portion of the average American’s diet. Likewise, civil discourse in America is worse now than it has been in a century or more. But Julia and Judith are not to be blamed for these failures. Just as you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink, you can lead a culture to fine dining and excellent manners but you cannot make it embrace either of those things. Likewise, just as Julia wasn’t the first woman to write well about American cuisine, Martin wasn’t the first woman to write well about American manners. Most famously, both Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt preceded her. But Judith Martin, in the guise of her alter ego Miss Manners, was the first great humorist to specialize in the subject of American manners. Even people who wouldn’t know a fish fork from a fruit fork (moi, par exemple) have delighted in her etiquette columns and books for nearly forty-five years. What’s more, her life story is fascinating. Her father was a Jewish refugee from the Russian Empire who arrived in America in 1912, the year of Julia Child’s birth. Judith was born in 1938. Like Julia, she was born into wealth and privilege. Her father was an economist for the United Nations and his job kept him moving from post to post. Judith grew up in a series of homes that were frequently visited by prominent diplomats and government attachés. She graduated from Wellesley College and then became a prominent journalist for the Washington Post. Although, unlike Julia, Judith has never been portrayed on film by Meryl Streep, she was portrayed by actress Jessie Meuller in Steven Spielberg’s 2017 film The Post, which starred Meryl Streep. Prior to becoming America’s leading etiquette maven, Martin made a name for herself by antagonizing Richard Nixon so effectively that he banned her from covering his daughter Tricia’s wedding.

Martin/Manners is a world traveler (she’s especially fond of Venice, about which she has written frequently) and a novelist. She is one of the few living Americans who – like Bruce Wayne, Peter Parker, and Clark Kent – has a much more famous one-named alter ego. Hollywood should be all over her.

Speaking of oddly named people, you might not think a writer born Howard Allen Frances O’Brien would belong in an article on this topic. But that was the birth name of Anne Rice, who did more to popularize vampire tales than almost any writer since Bram Stoker. She also did her bit for witches, mummies, and werewolves, as well. Born in 1941, she became the twentieth century’s bestselling female horror writer. She landed books on Publishers Weekly’s year-end list of the top-ten bestsellers in 1990, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1997, and 1998. Her books continued to land on bestseller lists until her death in 2021. She had a hardscrabble upbringing in New Orleans. Both of her parents were chronic alcoholics. She was raised a Catholic, later became an agnostic, re-embraced Catholicism around 1998, and then abandoned it again for secular humanism in the final decade of her life. She got married to her teenaged boyfriend at the age of 20 and moved with him to the San Francisco Bay Area. She lived in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district and also in Berkeley during the 1960s, but she never fell in with the hippie movement. In 1968 she earned a B.A. in political science from San Francisco State University. Her husband would eventually become chairman of the SFSU creative writing department. They had a daughter who died of leukemia at age six, possibly helping to spark Rice’s interest in immortal life. Their son, Christopher, became a bestselling author in his own right. Early in her career, Anne wrote soft-core pornography under the pennames Anne Rampling and A.N. Roquelaure. In 2003, after nearly dying from falling into a diabetic coma, Rice, now a widow, lost over 100 pounds and her health took a turn for the better. Her life had seemingly as many ups and downs as her fiction, and would make an ideal subject for a miniseries.

Eve Babitz, who died last year at the age of 78, lived a life eventful enough for a dozen miniseries. Born and raised in Hollywood, she first tasted fame when a photograph of her playing chess naked with (a fully clothed) Marcel DuChamp became an art world sensation in 1964.

Later in the 1960s, she made her mark by designing album covers for rock-n-rollers such as Linda Ronstadt, The Byrds, and Buffalo Springfield. She also contributed articles about popular culture to publications such as Rolling Stone, Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Vogue, and the Village Voice. In the 1970s she drew attention for her sexual liaisons with famous men such as Jim Morrison, Steve Martin, and Harrison Ford. Some have suggested her as the inspiration for the song “L.A. Woman,” one of the last songs Morrison recorded with The Doors. Babitz used L.A. Woman as the title of her 1982 novel, a fictionalized account of her time spent hanging out with Morrison and his band mates. Altogether, she published two novels, three short-story collections, and three books of nonfiction. But the genre labels aren’t that helpful. All of her work is mainly about herself and her relationship with the city of Los Angeles. Her novels, short stories, and articles all tend to blend elements of both fact and fiction. A prestige-TV miniseries that helped to separate the truth from the fiction would be a sure attention-getter. Hulu is apparently developing such a series. But one series doesn’t seem like enough to capture all the different aspects of this one-of-a-kind talent. We may need at least half a dozen. A freewheeling hippie in the 1960s, she had become a reactionary right-winger by the time of her death, an ideological journey taken by many of her generation. In 1997 her life was forever altered by a freak accident. While driving down the Pacific Coast Highway in her car, she accidentally dropped a lit match into her lap and ignited the skirt she was wearing, causing her pantyhose to melt to her skin. Like many Americans of the era, particularly freelance writers, she had no health insurance and had to beg friends for the cost of the medical care she required.

Edna Lewis was an African-American cookbook author born into the same generation as Julia Child but with a much different experience of life. The granddaughter of a slave woman, Lewis was born in Freetown, Virginia. In her 30s she made her way to New York City and eventually became the head chef at Café Nicholson, where authentic southern meals were served to some of the most prominent Americans of the 1940s and 1950s: William Faulkner, Eleanor Roosevelt, Tennessee Williams, Marlon Brando, Truman Capote, and many others, as well as to plenty of less famous folk. She also spent time as a reporter for the communist newspaper The Daily Worker and as a breeder of pheasants. In 1972, Knopf (Julia Child’s longtime publisher) brought out The Edna Lewis Cookbook, written in collaboration with Evangeline Peterson. Four years later, in 1976, Lewis published her masterpiece, The Taste of Country Cooking, which remains in print today and contains as much information about African-American and Southern culture as it does about making memorable meals. Unlike Child, Lewis worked in numerous restaurant kitchens and didn’t retire from the business until 1995, as the age of 79. She lived until 2006 and, late in life, formed a fascinating partnership with the much younger, white, gay, southern-cooking aficionado Scott Peacock. They collaborated on another highly regarded book, The Gift of Southern Cooking, published in 2003. Her story is at least as fascinating as Julia’s.

Jackie Collins’s life and work got the documentary treatment in 2021’s Lady Boss, which is available for streaming on NetFlix. But her larger-than-life story calls out for something much splashier. The younger sister of film and television star Joan Collins, Jackie was expelled from school in England at the age of fifteen. She followed her sister to Hollywood and sought work as an actress. She is reputed to have had an affair with Marlon Brando when he was 29 and she still a teenager. Hollywood wasn’t amenable to her, but when she returned to England she managed to land a few minor parts in British films. But there was nothing minor about Jackie’s ambitions. If the cinema wouldn’t make her a star, she’d seek out her fortune elsewhere. She published her first book, The World Is Full of Married Men, in 1968, at the age of 31. It became a bestseller despite of (or, more likely, because of) the fact that Barbara Cartland, the grande dame of British romance fiction, deemed it “nasty, filthy, and disgusting.” Actually, it was fairly tame. But Collins’s fiction would get a lot nastier with time – and a lot more successful. In the 1980s she made a transition even greater than the switch from cinema to pop fiction. That was the decade during which she moved, more or less permanently, to southern California, and became, for all intents and purposes, an American writer. Hollywood Wives, published in 1983, became her first real blockbuster book, finishing the year at number nine on Publishers Weekly’s list of the bestselling novels. It wouldn’t be her last appearance on the list. She returned in 1985 with Lucky, in 1986 with Hollywood Husbands, in 1988 with Rock Star, and 1990 with Lady Boss. But she would find even greater success in the twenty-first century than she had in the twentieth. She had eight bestsellers between the years 2000 and 2009. Her personal life had plenty of glamour in it too. In 2011, she told an interviewer for ABC News: “When I was a kid growing up, I used to read my father's Playboy and I'd see these guys and they had fantastic apartments and cars. I have all of that now.” According to Wikipedia she is the seventeenth bestselling writer of all time. Her twenty-five novels have sold roughly 400 million copies. Barbara Cartland, the third bestselling author of all time (behind only Shakespeare and Agatha Christie) has sold roughly 750 million copies of her work. But Cartland wrote 723 books, meaning her average title sold about a million copies. Collins’s titles have sold, on average, sixteen million copies each. She seems to have gotten the last laugh on Dame Barbara. And her story deserves the dishy treatment that she gave the heroines of her bestselling novels. I recommend that Kathryn Hahn or Emily Blunt star in it.

When Pat Booth died, in May of 2009, the Guardian ran an obituary that began like this: “Most people get a single chance at incarnating the zeitgeist, but Pat Booth, who has died of lung cancer aged 66, made a success of multiple of-the-moment employments - model, boutique owner, photographer and bonkbuster novelist.” Born into a working-class family in London’s East End, Booth’s childhood was Dickensian – and not in a good way. Veronica Horwell’s obituary of her continues: “Her childhood in London's East End might have sounded picturesque, but, as she said, the reality was ‘tough, cold, damp, and austere’. Her father worked in the docks, boxed at fairgrounds (she carried his towel), and helped her mother with her jellied eel business. Booth and her sister served when they were children on a stall outside Whitechapel station. When she was 13, her father gave her a gutting knife and told her: ‘Now's the time for you to learn.’" Along with Patty Boyd (later Mrs. Eric Clapton and, later still, Mrs. George Harrison), Twiggy, and Grace Cottington, Booth became one of the “it girls” of Britain’s modeling scene in the 1960s.

When her career in front of the camera began to fade, she moved behind the camera and became a successful photographer in her own right. She also became the co-proprietor of two successful London clothing boutiques, Countdown and Top Gear. In 1976, she married a wealthy banker and could have retired comfortably at that point while still only in her early thirties. Instead she began the most profitable of all her careers: writer of bestselling sex-and-shopping novels. Like Jackie Collins, she set her fictions mostly in fashionable American locales, as indicated by their titles: Malibu, Palm Beach, Beverly Hills, The Big Apple, Miami, and so forth. Though she never attained the dizzying heights reached by Collins and Judith Krantz (another author worthy of her own miniseries), her books sold well and, in the 1980s and 90s, were ubiquitous on airport bookstore shelves and beach blankets all across America. Her first husband committed suicide when Pat was 58. She found love once again, with adman Frank Lowe. When she married him in 2008, Patty Boyd served as her bridesmaid and Cliff Richard, according to the Guardian, caught the bouquet. Sadly, she would be dead within a year’s time. She wrote a lot of fabulous stories, but none were as fabulous as the one she lived, and it hasn’t yet been captured in a full-length biography or biopic. Some premium streaming service should remedy that now. I recommend Carey Mulligan for the part. But Anya Taylor Joy might also fill the bill nicely.

A miniseries about Judith Merril (1923-1997) would allow its producers an opportunity to chronicle the lives and careers of a number of other prominent science-fiction writers as well. That’s because, in addition to being one of the pioneers of feminist sci-fi, Merril was married to (and had a child with) Frederik Pohl, whose 75-year writing career was one of the most prominent in the sci-fi field (he was born in 1919 and lived long enough to win a Hugo Award in 2010 for a blog he wrote). After divorcing Pohl, she co-habited for a while with Walter Miller Jr., the reclusive author of the Hugo Award-winning 1959 novel A Canticle for Leibowitz. What’s more, as the New York Times noted in its obituary for Ms. Merril, “During and just after World War II, Ms. Merril was the only woman associated with a group of young science fiction enthusiasts known as the Futurians, whose members included Isaac Asimov, James Blish, C. M. Kornbluth and Frederick Pohl.” Two of her first three novels were written in collaboration with Kornbluth. Of course, even without her connections to all these men, Merril’s life would be worthy of a miniseries. Born Judith Josephine Grossman in Boston, her father committed suicide when Judith was six. After that tragedy, her mother, a suffragette and co-founder of the women’s Zionist organization Hadassah, moved with Judith to New York City and took a job at a Community center in the Bronx. Like Pohl, Judith never attended college. At various times she espoused Zionism, Marxism, and Trotskyism. She was one of the most prominent women in the sci-fi scene of the mid-twentieth century, distinguishing herself as a novelist, short-story writer, anthologist, editor, and book reviewer. An ardent opponent of the Vietnam war, Merril moved to Canada in the late 1960s and, in 1976, became a Canadian citizen, so as to deny the U.S. Treasury any taxes from her labors. She remained a Toronto resident until her death. But even in Canada she continued to be active in various anti-war movements, and protested the Canadian government’s decision to allow American cruise missiles to be tested over Canada. She organized writing conferences, experimental colleges, and library collections of science-fiction writings. She was an activist throughout her life. A miniseries about her life could well be used to provide an account of the entire sci-fi field of the mid- to late twentieth century. Make it so.

Carrie Fisher is another woman who became a successful novelist only after distinguishing herself in another field (in her case, as a film actress). Her life had enough drama for a dozen miniseries. Both of her parents (Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher) were celebrities, as was her only husband (Paul Simon), and several of her lovers (Harrison Ford, Dan Aykroyd, James Blunt). She never graduated from college, but managed to write four successful novels and four successful memoirs. She also wrote and co-wrote many film scripts, and reportedly worked as an anonymous script doctor on many others. I feel confident that she’ll be the subject of a few biopics and/or miniseries someday, but why wait? The Star Wars cinematic universe is probably more popular now than it has ever been. And she was a founding member of that universe. Her Princess Leia would inspire countless other badass female characters in fantasy and science-fiction films and TV shows, from Xena the Warrior Princess to Daenerys Targaryen. Fisher was quick to acknowledge that she made plenty of bad choices in her life. But bad choices can often make for dramatic biographies. I recommend Kristen Stewart for the role.

It’s a shame to see the relentless attention television and film have paid over the years to the biographies of just a handful of successful twentieth-century women writers – Child, Joan Didion, Sylvia Plath, Shirley Jackson, Dorothy Parker – when the last century or so has produced so many fascinating female literary successes, working in a wide variety of genres and styles. Other excellent choices for the biopic treatment include Grace Metalious, Patricia Highsmith, Beverly Cleary, Judy Blume, V.C. Andrews, Erica Jong, Isabelle Allende, Amy Tan, Alice Adams, Rita Mae Brown, Margaret Wise Brown, Susan Sontag, Mary Higgins Clark, Joanna Barnes, Laurie Colwin, Ursula LeGuin, and Margaret Walker. Heck, even the HBO Max program Julia contains three female characters who could all rightly be the subject of their own fascinating miniseries: legendary publisher Blanche Knopf (played by Judith Light), legendary editor Judith Jones (Fiona Glascott), and Avis DeVoto (Bebe Neuwirth), who was the wife of the great historian and writer Bernard DeVoto, a best friend of Julia Child, an acquaintance of Elizabeth David, Robert Frost, Wallace Stegner, and other prominent intellectuals and authors.

It’s time for Hollywood to put aside Child-ish things and delve into the lives of other fascinating female writers who came to prominence in the mid- to late-twentieth century, a literary category whose vast riches remain still largely untapped by the producers of biopics and fact-based miniseries.