Frances McDormand joins Meg Wolitzer adaptation ‘The Wife’

Hot off her SAG Award win for HBO’s literary adaptation “Olive Kitteridge,” Frances McDormand has signed on for another. Next up is a film adaptation of “The Wife,” Meg Wolitzer’s 2003 novel. As previoulsy announced, Glenn Close will star.

“The Wife” tells the story of the quiet (on the outside) wife of an acclaimed, big-personality novelist. “I was meek,” she admits. “I had no courage. I wasn’t a pioneer. I was shy. I wanted things but was ashamed to want them. I was a girl, and I couldn’t shake this feeling even as I had contempt for it.”

Our reviewer Laurie Stone found the novel “a rollicking, perfectly pitched triumph,” writing, “Wolitzer’s unqualified achievement is creating satire that’s purged of sentimentality and that seeks to protect nothing. Not marriage, not family life, not traditional arrangements between the sexes, not any of the stations we arrive at after boarding the desire train. ‘The Wife’ is an obituary for the ways men and women have functioned together in the past.”

Jonathan Pryce will play the novelist, Christian Slater, his biographer; Logan Lerman, the couple’s son. Brit Marling will play the young wife, and McDormand her Smith College mentor.

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