ow is as good a time as any to discuss this book I suppose. It’s being adapted into a film, slated to be directed by Catherine Hardwicke (Twilight, Little Red Riding Hood, Thirteen) [note: I started this post back in May].
If I haven’t made clear my general dislike of book to film adaptations, let me do so now: 9 times out of 10 I am disappointed. I do not subscribe to the belief that because film is a different medium that makes it OK to make unnecessary changes. Nay! I subscribe to the belief that yes, film is a different medium…and that’s why it should stay the hell away from books. My favorite films consist of two adaptations of novels (Pride and Prejudice and Gone With the Wind). And in the case of Pride and Prejudice I’m not talking about that adaptation with Keira Knightley (which quite frankly I loathe), I’m talking about the BBC mini-series, which isn’t technically a feature film, so there you go. When I say I don’t have high hopes for The Bitch Posse as a film, I mean that the chances are so high that I’m going to hate it that I might not even bother watching it for fear the actors chosen to play the parts will ruin the experience of the book for me.
But let’s talk about the book. In the summer of 2005 I found myself at the Rockefeller Center Barnes & Noble (the original one that closed, not the one that’s currently on 46th & Fifth) wandering around looking for a book to read.
The idea that I could go out and buy a book, all on my own, with no help from anyone or anything else: not a recommendation, not an author I’d ever heard of, not a book club pick, not a book I found lying around the house (i.e. belonging to my mom), not a book required for school or that I felt I should. No. Simply a book I came upon quite by accident, that I wanted to read because it sounded interesting. Period.
All other books before this had fallen into one of the aforementioned categories, which isn’t to say that I didn’t have plenty of favorites among them, but I often think of The Bitch Posse as the book that got me reading again, which is funny because I hadn’t actually stopped reading. I’ve never stopped reading. I did go through a 2 year dry spell in which I couldn’t finish very much, but that dry spell came AFTER The Bitch Posse, so it seems false to call The Bitch Posse the book that got me reading again. And yet.
And yet, I do think of my reading life as divided in half: books before The Bitch Posse and books after The Bitch Posse. Almost all of the books I still consider to be favorites today came after The Bitch Posse (and a whopping 10 of them I read in 2006). Favorites before The Bitch Posse seem somehow less legit, particularly those books I’d read in school. Yeah I told people I loved To Kill a Mockingbird, but what did that really mean? I still thought those books were great, but I was already starting to forget them. I was experiencing what’s known as I love you…who are you again? though I had no name for it at the time. They’ve become old lovers I remember fondly but have no real desire to go back to again. A crucial emotional bond is lacking for many of the books I read before college, something that prevents them from being absolute favorites even though I know at the time I thought they were fantastic.
It should be noted that I did choose my own books as a child. No one recommended Wayside School Is Falling Down to me. I saw a description of it in one of those Scholastic mail order things my school used to get and ordered it. But once I started reading with an eye for analysis (beginning in junior high school), my reading habits changed, my method of selecting books changed. And while I can easily explain why the way I read changed, I really don’t know why I never thought to go into a bookstore a select a book at random after that. I know reading was somewhat ruined for me after To Kill A Mockingbird (a book we analyzed to the brink of extinction in 6th grade) and many of the books I read on my own time were more commercial in nature. Reading for school became somewhat taxing even when I genuinely liked the books, and my outside reading was largely an effort to counter that. But going into a bookstore and selecting a book on the basis of the synopsis alone? No. Not until The Bitch Posse. And so, though I’ve said virtually nothing about the book itself, The Bitch Posse is the book that changed the way I read. It got me to take chances with books again. And I haven’t taken as many recommendations since then. That’s not why I love the book, but it is why it can truly be called one of the Books That Made Me.
one With the Wind turned 75 this past Thursday and will always have a special place in my heart. It was my first favorite ‘adult’ book. Like many, I saw the film first. It was often shown on WPIX around Thanksgiving and my mom would watch it every year. Plus she had a lovely special edition. At the time, I was too young to appreciate it. THIS FILM IS TOO LONG, I thought. WHY IS THERE AN INTERMISSION?! But eventually something clicked. And I can no longer remember if reading the book helped things click or if the movie finally started to resonate with me and then I began reading the book (probably the latter). I would read a chapter here and there. For whatever reason, I didn’t start at the beginning, I kind of just dived in. I suppose it wasn’t really my intention to read the whole thing, I was mostly looking for clarification and expansion. But eventually I did end up reading the whole thing. It took years, not because of its length so much as the sporadic nature of my reading. Something kept calling me back. Despite what anyone says, the book is a lot better than the film. It’s infinitely more detailed. The film chooses to focus most of its attention on Scarlett and Rhett because it has to. It’s already four hours even with its diminished scope. But the book actually goes into a lot of detail about Scarlett’s parents, and you get a better sense of her sisters’ motivations (Suellen, though still detestable in the book, is a fully fleshed out character and not just a one dimensional whiny brat). Scarlett is both a better and worse mother (she does truly love Bonnie, though she is never as attentive as Rhett, but she is an awful mother to her first two children who don’t even exist in the film but would shed light on why Rhett tells her that ‘even a cat’s a better mother than you’). 
D. Salinger is a little like Radiohead for me — sometimes I have to willfully misunderstand the content in order to get anything out of the work, or I relate to it on one level but not another (e.g Seymour: An Introduction). It feels a bit like cheating, especially because I recognize it. But books and music mean different things to different people, and so I try not to think about it too much. Franny and Zooey is a little like that for me. When I say I can relate to Franny, I don’t mean her religious zeal but rather her utter dissatisfaction and disillusionment with the world around her. But hers is a spiritual crisis, one I kind of choose to ignore the details of and focus on the overall sentiment. 
