1993 College alum's novel to be made into a movie

It took 1993 College graduate Caren Lissner 10 years after graduation to get her first novel published.

“Persistence pays off,” she said.

That novel, “Carrie Pilby,” was a runaway success. And today, 10 years after its first release, it’s being developed into a movie.

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The novel was released in 2003 and tells the story of Carrie, a 19-year-old freshly anointed with a Harvard diploma. Carrie moves to New York City after graduation and confronts the adult world, finding it a tough change from college life.

The novel found success when first published, selling 50,000 copies on its original run, with a rerelease in 2010.

Part of the success of “Carrie Pilby” when it was first published was its place in the huge “chick lit” movement. Chick literature became popular in the late ‘90s with the publication of “Bridget Jones’s Diary” and dominated the market for years after.

A major conflict of the novel is Carrie’s attempt to live an adult social life as a fresh college grad, and Lissner acknowledges that the novel is partly autobiographical. “Well, I was pretty nerdy and shy … so I guess I just took my own experiences and exaggerated it. I lived in Hoboken, and it’s a place with a lot of people, but where it’s also hard sometimes to find people who are like you,” she said.

“It’s a problem because college is this place where it’s so easy to meet people who are just like you, and then you have to go into the real world where not everyone is like you and they’re harder to meet,” Lissner added.

A Penn alum giving her protagonist a Harvard degree may smack of treason to some. When asked about it, she laughed and replied, “That’s a good question. I wanted to make it even more extreme, because when people think about the brainiest college, they think of Harvard.”

“Penn is a cool and smart people place. Harvard is just smart,” she said.

While “Carrie Pilby” found success in the early 2000s, many in the publishing world seem to have since moved on from chick lit. Harlequin Enterprises, publisher of Lissner’s novel, closed its Red Dress Ink imprint in 2008 and ended much of its chick lit publishing.

However, Lissner believes “Carrie Pilby” will find success again.

She added in an email, “There’s a growing genre now called ‘new adult,’ with main characters 18-25 trying to navigate post-college life. ‘New adult’ books seem to be the hot new genre, and TV shows are popping up in that genre as well, like Lena Dunham’s ‘Girls.’ ‘Carrie Pilby’ fits better into that category than young adult or ‘chick lit,’ because it was always kind of between both, so maybe the timing of this movie is exactly right!”

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Still, the production team behind the movie needs to demonstrate that there’s a market. “The producers, while they are very successful in Hollywood, have to show potential investors that there’s a fan base and that the word is spreading,” Lissner points out.

To that end, the team has shown its support for the project by creating a Kickstarter fund.

Kickstarter is a crowd funding website founded in 2009 with the goal of getting the public to fund ideas, inventions, and projects that perhaps wouldn’t have had a chance through traditional means of funding.

Visitors to the site can become “backers” to projects by donating amounts that generally range from $1 to $10,000. The backers receive rewards for the money they give, like tickets to a premiere, copies of books or games, or acknowledgments. Some Kickstarter funds have had runaway success, like in the case of the Pebble E-Watch, which has earned 1,000 times the amount it first set as a goal.

The Kickstarter for “Carrie Pilby” has, to date, 112 backers, and has raised more than $22,000 of its $50,000 goal. The campaign is only two weeks in, and has two to go, but the team is enthusiastic and hopes are high.

“What’s exciting about it is that any regular person who’s passionate about the book, or who just wants to support a quirky independent film, can leave comments on the page for the filmmakers, engage in dialogue with them, and ask questions,” Lissner said of the crowd funding effort.

“It takes a village to make a quirky independent film.”

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