Maya Van Wagenen is 15, Getting a Dreamworks Movie of Her Book

In a story that seems perfectly designed to make you feel like you’ve done nothing with your life, Dreamworks has optioned the rights to a diary fifteen-year-old Maya Van Wagenen kept when she was thirteen. This makes her the youngest non-actor to get a feature film deal with Dreamworks pictures.

Wagenen’s diary, published through Penguin, is an account of the year she spent adjusting to life in a new school where she struggled to fit in. She perservered, apparently, by taking the advice of a 1958 advice book for young women Betty Cornell’s Glamour Guide for Teens. According to Deadline:

She found social footing by following such advice as: always wearing white gloves, using pearls as a fashion accessory; and never forgetting that a girdle can be a girl’s best friend. The most important lessons conveyed were timeless ones like being open and honest, and kind. She found that each social clique was distrustful of the others, and that all of the kids bore similar insecurities. She was able to find common ground and feel for the first time like she belonged.

Amy Harris, veteran of Sex and the City, Gossip Girl, and The Carrie Diaries, is on hand to script the movie adaptation, with Macosko Krieger, longtime assistant of Steven Spielberg, taking it on as her first project as sole producer. Ms. Wagenen, we look forward to seeing you on the red carpet!

(via Deadline.)

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Susana Polo

Susana Polo thought she'd get her Creative Writing degree from Oberlin, work a crap job, and fake it until she made it into comics. Instead she stumbled into a great job: founding and running this very website (she's Editor at Large now, very fancy). She's spoken at events like Geek Girl Con, New York Comic Con, and Comic Book City Con, wants to get a Batwoman tattoo and write a graphic novel, and one of her canine teeth is in backwards.

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