This spring the circus will alight in theatres across North America when Sara Gruen’s vision of the big tent spectacles of yesteryear will be made into a film.
Reese Witherspoon and Robert Pattinson will star in the screen version of Water for Elephants. The book has been on The New York Times’ and Globe and Mail bestseller lists for 101 weeks—and counting.
Gruen, BA/93, her husband and children all had cameos in the film.
“There, laid out before me, was the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth,” said Gruen, of her first visit to the movie set. “I was nearly speechless. I remember thinking, five years ago this was all in my head, and here it is, real. Well, Hollywood real. But still.”
Set in a traveling circus during the Great Depression, the poignant love story is Gruen’s third novel. It’s one she hadn’t set out to write. She’d been working on another book when she came across an old photograph of a circus in her newspaper.
“I knew shamefully little about the Depression, and even less about the circus, so I immersed myself in months of research before I ever wrote a thing.”
Once completed, the genre-defying story came close to never being sold at all. Publishers didn’t know what to call it, and large bookstores were reluctant to purchase or promote a book they couldn’t classify within traditional genres.
“Fortunately it was embraced by independent bookstores who hand-sold it and recommended it to book clubs, to the point that chain stores could no longer ignore it,” explained Gruen.
They haven’t made the same mistake twice. Gruen has recently released her fourth novel, Ape House, another New York Times bestseller, to critical acclaim.
A former student of English literature at Carleton, Gruen will return to campus to teach a master class in creative writing to undergraduate students.
While she agrees with the truism “write what you know,” her advice to aspiring writers is to go ahead and explore new themes.
“You’d just better know a hell of a lot about it by the time you start to write!”
Originally printed in FASSinate Spring 2011