That's the Sound of Women Talking

Flat out ashamed it's taken a full day to get around to mentioning this terribly exciting news -- I've been so buried in Jake Gyllenhaal's ass (hrm) that I haven't been able to come up for air (hrmmmm) to talk about anything else, I guess -- ahem! Sarah Polley is making a new movie! It's her first since 2012's brilliant and deeply moving Stories We Tell, if you can believe it. (And you should, since I just told you that.) And not just that (although that would be enough) -- it will star Frances McDormand! Frannie, on the other hand, we see lots of, but we're still excited every time. It's going to be an adaptation of the many-award-winning novel Women Talking from writer Miriam Toews, which is described thus via Amazon:

"One evening, eight Mennonite women climb into a hay loft to conduct a secret meeting. For the past two years, each of these women, and more than a hundred other girls in their colony, has been repeatedly violated in the night by demons coming to punish them for their sins. Now that the women have learned they were in fact drugged and attacked by a group of men from their own community, they are determined to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm. 

 While the men of the colony are off in the city, attempting to raise enough money to bail out the rapists and bring them home, these women-all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their community and unable even to speak the language of the country they live in-have very little time to make a choice: Should they stay in the only world they've ever known or should they dare to escape? 

Based on real events and told through the “minutes” of the women's all-female symposium, Toews's masterful novel uses wry, politically engaged humor to relate this tale of women claiming their own power to decide."

No surprise here but Margaret Atwood -- who Polley collaborated with on her TV adaptation of Alias Grace -- is a big fan of this book, having called it a real-life story out of her Handmaid's Tale. Have any of you read it? This book was a best-seller and won "Book of the Year" from the NYT Book Review so I am sure plenty of you have read it. I have not, but it sounds like an ace fit for all these incredible and talented names involved.