Powers’ bestselling novel centres on five trees that align with the lives of nine diverse Americans, ultimately tightening the threads between these characters and motivating them to protect and fight for our delicate natural world.

Since reading the Pulitzer Prize winner of 2019, I’ve never quite looked at trees in the same way. And after finding out that Netflix will adapt The Overstory to a series (announced in February 2021), I hope this will only add to my love for the book.

Hearing that one of your favourite books will be adapted to the screen can be both a blessing and a curse, hingeing on the success and faithfulness of the adaptation – but also on your idea of what’s accurate according to your own imagination.

How will it be with The Overstory? Right now, it’s too early to find out. But here’s what we know about The Overstory adaptation on Netflix so far to start setting our expectations…

What we know about The Overstory on Netflix

The job of adapting The Overstory is in experienced hands: those of David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, best known as the creators of Game of Thrones. (When I told my husband this, he replied oh, god. It could go either way with them, he said.)

There’s no current expected release date or production date. Perhaps we can expect The Overstory to come to screens in 2023-2024, but hopefully we’ll find out more about the series soon.

Hugh Jackman will also executive produce along with Bernie Caulfield of Benioff and Weiss’s Bighead Littlehead production banner. Richard Powers is set to serve as co-executive producer.

According to The Hollywood Reporter in 2021, Jackman is reportedly a fan of the novel, as is Netflix co-CEO Reed Hastings. Netflix describes the novel as “a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of the natural world.” 

“It tells the story of a world alongside ours that is vast, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive and almost invisible to us,” the announcement on Deadline shared in February 2021. “A handful of disparate people learn how to see that world and are drawn into its unfolding catastrophe.”

At a time when news sites quip “another day, another cancellation from Netflix,” fingers crossed we’ll hear more updates soon about The Overstory series.

David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are also writers and executive producers on the Netflix series adaptation of the sci-fi book trilogy The Three-Body Problem, as part of a nine-figure deal they signed with Netflix in 2019.

What to read while you’re waiting for The Overstory on Netflix

At this stage, we have no real idea of when The Overstory might be released on Netlix. But there are plenty of fantastic books to read in the meantime.

Start by reading or re-reading The Overstory, and continue with these similarly beautiful books about trees.

One of my favourite books like The Overstory is Greenwood by Michael Christie, a gorgeous multi-generational novel about trees, our changing climate, the twists and turns of fortune, and doing the right thing.

The post The Overstory on Netflix: what we know about the series so far appeared first on Tolstoy Therapy.

As a Brit, I had at least a vague idea of most of the historical events it covers, but I’ve loved watching The Crown to put more of the pieces together over several decades… even with the fictionalization that’s been causing a stir back in the UK.

Are the early seasons better than the later ones? Yes, absolutely. But I’ll still watch them with joy, including Season 5.

One unexpected gem in the new series is in Episode 6, “Ipatiev House,” in which the Prime Minister, John Major, shares Anna Dostoevskaya’s thoughts on the key to a happy marriage, as wife to Fyodor Dostoevsky.

In their regular meeting in this fictional portrayal, Major congratulates the Queen on her upcoming 47th wedding anniversary. In return, she asks Major how long he has been married, to which he answers 24 years.

“We must all be doing something right. What do you suppose that is?” asks the Queen.

I love the response from The Crown‘s John Major:

“One of the most memorable accounts of a long successful marriage comes from Dostoevsky’s wife, Anna. She and Fyodor were, she said, of contrasting character… different temperaments. Entirely opposing views. Yet they never tried to change one another. Nor interfere with the other’s soul. This, she believed, enabled her and her husband to live in harmony.”

“By having nothing whatsoever in common?” asks the Queen. Major replies: “Mm. The key to a happy marriage, it seems.”

Where did Anna Dostoevskaya share this marriage advice?

Anna Dostoevskaya’s timeless advice for a happy marriage is shared in her spectacular memoir, Dostoevsky Reminiscences. In this book, she recalls a conversation with Fyodor Dostoevsky during a tea break when they first met in 1865.

During this time, the then-Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina was working with Dostoevsky as a stenographer as he wrote an entire novel (The Gambler) in four weeks as part of an exchange to repay gambling debts.

In response to Dostoevsky’s assertion that he had never felt happy, or at least not the happiness he had already dreamed of, Anna advised him to marry again. Anna shares how the conversation continued:

“While we were on the theme of marriage, he asked me why I didn’t marry myself. I answered that I had two suitors, both splendid people and that I respected them both very much but did not love them — and that I wanted to marry for love.

‘For love, without fail,’ he seconded me heartily. ‘Respect alone isn’t enough for a happy marriage!’“

Their love story is a splendid one, really. With Anna’s help, Dostoevsky finished the novel in just twenty-six days. He paid her, thanked her, and planned a celebratory dinner at a restaurant (Anna’s first ever) the next day.

As Maria Popova shares on The Marginalian, Dostoevsky realised that his collaboration with Anna had brought more light and joy into his life than anything before. He was devastated by the prospect of not seeing her again, and asked if she would help him finish Crime and Punishment.

Just ten days after the end of their first project, she was back at his house. They walked to his study, where he proposed marriage through the guise of describing a new novel he was writing. It was about a troubled artist of his age, possessed with a tender heart but incapable of expressing his feelings, and desperately in love with a young woman whom he feared he had nothing to offer.

Fyodor and Anna were married in February 1867, and remained in love until Dostoevsky’s death fourteen years later.

The key to a happy marriage, according to Anna Dostoevskaya

In the afterword to her memoir, Anna shares the sentiment that is closest to what John Major shares in The Crown:

“In truth, my husband and I were persons of ‘quite different construction, different bent, completely dissimilar views.’ But we always remained ourselves, in no way echoing nor currying favor with one another, neither of us trying to meddle with the other’s soul, neither I with his psyche nor he with mine. And in this way my good husband and I, both of us, felt ourselves free in spirit.”

Anna didn’t interfere in her husband’s spiritual and intellectual life, and recalls how he would sometimes say to her, “You are the only woman who ever understood me!”

She adds that, “He looked on me as a rock on which he felt he could lean, or rather rest”, and believes it was these mutual attitudes that enabled them to “live in the fourteen years of our married life in the greatest happiness possible for human beings on earth.”

The post What was Anna Dostoevskaya’s advice on the key to a happy marriage in The Crown? appeared first on Tolstoy Therapy.

Published in 2018, Circe is Madeline Miller’s defiant reimagining of the daughter of Helios, the sun god, and the ocean nymph Perse, known in myth as a dangerous sorceress, perhaps the most dangerous woman a man could come across.

When her gift threatens the gods, she is banished to the island of Aiaia where she hones her occult craft, casting spells, gathering strange herbs and taming wild beasts.

But she won’t be left in peace for long, and it’s for an unexpected visitor, the mortal Odysseus, for whom Circe will risk everything.

While we’re waiting on Madeline Miller’s next book, there’s some more good news to look forward to: Circe is being adapted as an HBO Max series.

Circe will be an HBO Max series

Now, this news has been around for a while. Madeline Miller shared back in 2019:

“As an author, it is an honor to have my work in the hands of such passionate, experienced, and thoughtful people. I can’t wait to see what they do with Circe’s story, and most of all I love that they are keeping the Witch of Aiaia firmly at the center of her own epic journey–just where she belongs.”

HBO’s Circe was given an expected release date of 2021, which here at the end of 2022 realistically means 2023 at the earliest.

That said, nothing has been shared about Circe by HBO in the last couple of years, so let’s hope this is just a waiting game while they perfect casting and filming rather than second thoughts.

While we wait to find out more details, here’s what we know about the Circe adaptation for TV so far.

What do we know about the HBO Max adaptation of Circe so far?

Back in 2019, Madeline Miller announced that HBO Max had bought the rights for an eight-episode season of Circe.

In a piece on Deadline, it was shared that Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver – the American married screenwriting and film production duo known for Planet of the Apes – will write and executive produce the drama, which hails from Chernin Entertainment and Endeavor Content.

Here’s how IMDb describes the upcoming Circe adaptation:

“A modern take on the world of Greek mythology told from the powerful feminist perspective of the goddess Circe, who transforms from an awkward nymph to a formidable witch, able to challenge gods, titans and monsters alike.”

Sarah Aubrey, head of originals at HBO Max, shared in the announcement that:

“Circe tells an epic story of love, loss, tragedy and immortal conflict, all through the eyes of a fierce female lens […] I’ve been a longtime fan of Rick and Amanda’s work and their ability to simultaneously build epic imaginative worlds while creating emotional dynamic characters. In partnership with Peter Chernin and Jenno Topping, we have the dream team to bring Circe to life.”

What to read while waiting for Circe on HBO Max

While we’re waiting the undefined period before Circe is released on HBO Max, what to read?

The obvious starting point is Circe, of course, whether as a re-read or first-time read, alongside Madeline Miller’s other bestseller The Song of Achilles. I’ve also previously shared these similar books to Circe.

In the next year, we will also hopefully hear more about Madeline Miller’s novel-in-progress, Persephone.

For now, I’d wholeheartedly recommend reading Madeline Miller’s short story Galatea if you haven’t yet, which has recently been published as a beautiful (and tiny) hardcover for the first time.

The post Circe adaptation for HBO Max: what we know about the series appeared first on Tolstoy Therapy.

The addition of the poem did feel a little staged, but I love intertextuality in films (the Dickens A Tale of Two Cities reference got me through The Dark Knight Rises, for instance).

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

I hope you gain some personal meaning from the poem, as I have. The last two lines of the above passage are on a post-it next to my desk, for reference when I’m having a bad day and not feeling particularly strong.

It’s such a great poem to read for a bit of bibliotherapy – especially if, like me, you’re working through trauma. It helps me realise that although I’ve been through some bad experiences (haven’t we all?), it doesn’t mean that I’m weak or need to be stuck in the past.

If you want to read more of Tennyson’s forever-relevant poems, you can find a collection of his poetry here.

The post The Poem M Reads in Skyfall: A Quote From Tennyson’s Ulysses appeared first on Tolstoy Therapy.