Hollywood actress Kerry Washington is to produce and star in an upcoming feature film based on the memoir of journalist Diane Cardwell.
“Rockaway” was named one of the Best Adventure Travel Books of the Year by Outside Magazine.
“Unmoored by a failed marriage and disconnected from her high-octane life in the city, Diane Cardwell finds herself staring at a small group of surfers coasting through mellow waves toward shore—and senses something shift. Rockaway is the riveting, joyful story of one woman’s reinvention—beginning with taking the A Train to Rockaway, a neglected spit of land dangling off New York City into the Atlantic Ocean. She finds a teacher, buys a tiny bungalow and throws her not-overly-athletic self headlong into learning the inner workings and rhythms of waves and the muscle development and coordination needed to ride them,” the book’s synopsis reads in part.
Cardwell founded Vibe Magazine. The former reporter served as the editor for The New York Times, and 7 Days, an award-winning New York weekly that wrapped in 1990. Cardwell is also an arts and entertainment contributor and editor at several national magazines.
This is not the first time Washington has turned her hand to a best-selling novel.
Her series adaptation of the bestselling novel “Little Fires Everywhere” earned five Emmy nominations last year.
“I think the novel is so much about identity and how the roles and the context of our identity contributes to how we live and relate to others in the world. So we knew that adding this layer of race would add to that complexity in an exciting way,” she said in an interview with NPR.
She says she used her mother for inspiration when playing Mia.
“My mom didn’t always feel the need to always make a situation comfortable for somebody else,” Washington explained. “If her answer was that she was from the South Bronx and that made the other moms who were living on Park Avenue – ’cause I went to a private school in New York – if that made – if that answer made them uncomfortable, she let it make them uncomfortable, I think, because as a teacher, she also knew that that was a learning opportunity for them.”
