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On Multi-flexing Critical and Fictional Muscle – Thelma Adams comments

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thelma-adamsIn recent years, when I’ve experienced so much strife in the New York Film Critics Circle after nearly two decades of active membership, I’ve often thought back to the first day I attended the voting meeting. I was seven or eight months pregnant with a child that would arrive early and with great difficulty, and I entered the meeting room with such hope and trepidation.

I’ve planned to write about it as an essay for some time and then, when Nikki Finke asked me to write fiction for her blog “Hollywood Dementia,” this was the story I wrote. I wrote it in first person first. Even though it was fictionalized, Nikki gave me the note to go third person. I did that and then it all began to shift.

If I had more time, I would rewrite it wilder and farther from the truth and yet closer to the emotional truth. I have an MFA in fiction from Columbia and have always written both forms simultaneously – my latest novel, a female-driven Western called THE LAST WOMAN STANDING: A Novel of Mrs. Wyatt Earp will be out from Amazon Publishing in July.

As I told Jennifer Merin, fiction is a different and wonderful muscle for me but the themes of my criticism and fiction are twin: showing the world from the female gaze.

Read my multiflex of critical and fictional muscle on Hollywood Dementia

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Thelma Adams

THELMA ADAMS is a writer and leading New York based film critic. She was twice Chair of the New York Film Critics Circle where she was a member for 19 years.. She is the Film Editor at ZEALnyc.com. She covered the Oscars for Yahoo! Movies for three seasons, interviewing celebrities from Julianne Moore to Joaquin Phoenix to Oprah Winfrey. Her second novel, The Other Mrs. Earp, will be published by Amazon Publishing’s Lake Union imprint in summer of 2016. The New York Times favorably reviewed her debut novel, Playdate, published by St. Martin's Press. Her essays have been anthologized, most recently in O's Little Book of Happiness. Previously, she was the film critic at Us Weekly (2000 – 2011) and the New York Post (1993 – 2000).