Julia Roberts’ favourite novel of all time: “A book that will just destroy you”
Julia Roberts has starred in many amazing cinematic adaptations of books.
Early in her career, she started with some legal dramas, playing opposite Denzel Washington in The Pelican Brief, an adaptation of John Grisham’s eponymous hooky legal thriller, and another thriller in the form of Leave the World Behind. Branching out, perhaps her most famous literary movie is Eat, Pray, Love, based on the mega-selling memoirs of Elizabeth Gilbert, but she’s also starred in romance drama and young-adult adaptations, such as Dying Young and Wonder, respectively.
Bringing all these bookish characters to life, it’s no surprise that in her life off the screen, Roberts is a bit of a reader herself. As she explained in an interview with Oprah, her personal bookshelf includes a litany of classic authors, with her favourites ranging from Victorian to post-modernist, including Thomas Hardy, Jeanette Winterson, and Anita Diamant, but her all-time top spot belongs to William Faulkner.
Born in Mississippi in 1897, Faulkner is widely regarded as one of the finest writers ever to come from the American South. His works include two Pulitzer Prize winners, A Fable and The Reivers, as well as As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and The Sound and the Fury, a favourite of Roberts’ Mary Reilly co-star John Malkovich. As for the lady herself, her heart belongs to Faulkner’s 1939 tale, The Wild Palms.
“This would have to be my favourite classic novel,” she confessed, “It’s such a beautiful, tragic love story, a book that will just destroy you. And Faulkner’s language is so utterly descriptive. He can write an entire page that consists of only adjectives and two commas.”
She goes on a bit of a tangent about his punctuation use and its impact on her youthful schoolgirl life, noting, “Actually, he’s the reason I ended up passing high school English, because my punctuation was always kind of…eccentric. I would say to my teacher, ‘Well, you know, William Faulkner, he doesn’t use proper punctuation’. And one of my teachers ended up devising a system with two grades, where you were graded on content and then on whether it was properly written.”
The Wild Palms was originally going to be called If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, but publisher Random House took issue with it and changed it to as it stands. Most editions of the book released in the years since its debut have included some allusion to both names. The story is a non-linear amalgamate of two seemingly unconnected narratives, one about a prisoner attempting to jailbreak, ending up rescuing a heavily pregnant woman from drowning, and the other about lowly intern Harry, whose life changes forever when he meets a married woman at a party, and the two decide to elope.
Though there has never been a direct film adaptation of The Wild Palms, its influence can be felt across a wide range of movies. A quote from the book, “Given the choice between grief and nothing, I will take grief”, features in Jean-Luc Godard’s seminal Nouvelle Vague project Breathless. On a completely different note, it can also be heard in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Wim Wenders is clearly a fan, as he featured the book in his 1976 film Kings of the Road, and then again 47 years later in his love letter to Tokyo, public toilets, and a quiet life lived in the towering chiaroscuro of trees, Perfect Days.
Faulkner can be a bit hard to get into, especially with his aforementioned lack of punctuation, but enough highly respected people have endorsed him that he must be worth trying. If you can’t trust Julia Roberts, Godard and Wim Wenders for a book recommendation, then who can you trust?
