Grace Coopersmith’s "Nancy’s Theory of Style"

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Grace Coopersmith is a San Francisco Bay Area native and still lives there. She went to Stanford, where she studied creative writing, literature, and theatre.

Here she shares some insights about casting an adaptation of her new novel, Nancy’s Theory of Style:

Some characters come to me whole: I can see them in my mind, hear their voices, and know exactly what they’d say and do. Nancy Carrington-Chambers is one of those characters. She’s the girl you love to hate: she’s richer than you, went to better schools than you, and is invited to swankier parties and clubs than you. As a friend, she’s a guilty pleasure. The more you know her, the more you enjoy the appalling things she says and does.

She’s blond, blue-eyed, petite and more cute than beautiful, “a grown-up version of the cutest kid in kindergarten.” She’s formulating an all-encompassing theory of style that she believes will be more useful than Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.

Her playful attitude and sense of entitlement are her most important qualities. I’d like to see someone like Mila Kunis (from Forgetting Sarah Marshall and That ‘70s Show) cast as Nancy. Although Kunis is dark-haired, she has a marvelous sense of comic timing and could deliver Nancy’s lines with aplomb.

Nancy hires the perfect assistant, Derek Cathcart, for her event planning company. “The tall, dark-haired man walked into the room wearing a windowpane suit in charcoal with a chalk line in the subtlest lavender, and a lavender shirt. She’d dreamed of meeting a man who could wear a windowpane pattern with élan…he had deep blue eyes… He wore his straight, espresso-dark hair and sideburns long, but beautifully cut -– too beautifully for a straight man.”

Derek is English and he has a smirk more than a smile. So I’d have to say Richard Armitage, who smirks like nobody’s business.

I’d love to see snarky, hilarious Betty White as Miss Binky Winkles, a local character, and America Ferrera as Milagro, Nancy’s smart, sexy, and eccentric friend.

One of the biggest characters in the book is the city of San Francisco. It photographs beautifully and ideally should be cast as itself.

A few producers are now looking at Nancy’s Theory of Style, and I hope one will decide to option it as a movie.

Read an excerpt from Nancy’s Theory of Style, and learn more about the book and author at Grace Coopersmith's website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue