Karen Rinaldi was trying to help her friend Rebecca Miller figure out a new project after her 2013 book Jacob’s Folly. The novel had taken Miller five years to write, so she was ready to get back to moviemaking — her films include The Private Lives of Pippa Lee and The Ballad of Jack and Rose, which starred her husband, Daniel Day-Lewis.
But she didn’t want the pressure of coming up with a script from scratch. Rinaldi, a publisher, was racking her brain for good manuscripts that might fit the bill but kept coming up empty.
“Then I said, ‘You know what? Let me tell you a story,’ ” Rinaldi recalls. “And I told her the story about Maggie.”
Maggie is a single woman who wants a baby, though she believes that being one-half of a couple isn’t her thing. Then, just as she’s ironing out the details of her artificial insemination, she meets a married man, falls in love, breaks up his marriage and gets pregnant. But the hitches keep coming: Fast-forward a couple years, and she’s having second thoughts. Maybe she really is better off alone. So she hatches a plan to reunite her husband with his ex.
Miller was in. And that’s how the utterly delightful screwball comedy Maggie’s Plan came to be. After a successful run at Sundance, it hit theaters last weekend, earning critical praise for its original story and exceptional leads: Greta Gerwig as Maggie, Ethan Hawke as the father of her child and Julianne Moore playing Georgette, his ex.
So where exactly did the story of Maggie come from?
There are two answers. The simpler: Rinaldi wrote a novel a decade earlier about four women whose lives intersect and diverge. She never could sell it, even though she’d shopped it to people she knew in the industry and even HBO. It had been stashed away in a desk for years.
But it was also, in part, based on her own life. Many years ago, Rinaldi was a lot like Maggie. She had given up on finding a partner but still wanted a child.
“I had been married and divorced twice before and I said, ‘You know what? I’m done,’ ” she says in a call from her New York office where she runs the Harper Collins imprint HarperWave. “I’m just going to have a baby, and I’m good. I’ll have lovers, but I can’t be married. There’s no partner for me.”
Or was there?
“The real story is: then I met Joel, and he was a great partner even though it was a terrible mess,” she said. “Affairs are horrible.”
Joel Rose was half of the husband-and-wife team responsible for the edgy 1980s literary magazine Between C & D. He and Catherine Texier, who have two children, were sort of a golden couple of the publishing world. Rinaldi was working as an editor at Crown Publishers at the time, and after she bought Rose’s novel, Kill Kill Faster Faster, the two fell for each other.
Texier went on to write Break-Up, her own version of Nora Ephron’s marital tell-all Heartburn. It was “a very public blade job, a salaciously mesmerizing, well-constructed, unanswerable work of middle-class revenge,” the New York Observer wrote of the memoir in 1998. It was a literary scandal.
Years later, Rinaldi and Rose are still together. So the part about reuniting her husband with his ex is pure fiction.
This is the part of the story where you’re supposed to take sides. Who is the villain here?
That’s what’s so wonderfully surprising about Maggie’s Plan. The movie isn’t about women facing off against each other. Well, maybe it is at first. Maggie believes John is a saint trapped in a terrible marriage to an ice queen. But then, once the two meet, Maggie realizes she was all wrong about Georgette. The women couldn’t be more different, but they genuinely enjoy each other’s company.
That part echoes real life. Rinaldi and Texier are on good terms. “I’m fond of her,” Rinaldi says.
Though in the movie, Maggie and Georgette are closer, even teaming up at one point. Both of them, plus John, are good guys — but also bad guys sometimes.
Rinaldi was interested in the “idea of the other woman always being the enemy, when the other woman is just another woman who loved the same guy,” she says.
Rinaldi’s book and the movie tell somewhat different stories, and Miller, who also adapted the script, has a lighter touch with the material, according to Rinaldi. Miller was inspired, in part, by A Midsummer Night’s Dream, she recently told The Washington Post.
“I’m a little bit like a bull in a china shop where Rebecca has a lot more finesse than I do,” Rinaldi says.
As buzz around the movie has grown, so too has interest in Rinaldi’s novel. She reworked some passages and it’s now set for a March release as The End of Men.
Like the movie, the book doesn’t entirely mirror reality. “I’m not Maggie and Georgette is not Catherine,” Rinaldi says.
That much is clear. Maggie is loopy and naive with a gentle presence. Rinaldi is powerful, focused and bursting with ideas. She said she first wrote the book because she was “pissed off” about the way women, especially working moms, were portrayed in the media.
“Why do we have to be either neurotic or bad mothers or sacrifice our careers or only have a career and not do the other thing?” she says. “That’s crap, because I know a lot of women who are actually not only pulling it together and doing it, but doing it really well.”
Aside from having a big job, Rinaldi has two children with Rose, who still writes. He even penned an ode to his “alpha wife” for Marie Claire a few years back.
“He winds up being a guy I could be a partner with, which is a miracle to me,” she says. “We’ve been together for 21 years, which is the biggest joke in the world.”