Sonya Kelly on Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Sonya Kelly (winner of a 2024 Windham Campbell Prize for Drama) joins Michael Kelleher to admire and contemplate Jeremy Leggatt’s translation of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. They discuss film adaptations, writing emotions, keeping audiences happy, and more.

For a full episode transcript, click here.

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Reading list: 

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, tr. by Jeremy Leggatt • The Hours by Michael Cunningham • Once Upon a Bridge by Sonya Kelly

From the episode:

Michael Kelleher: It was so interesting for me to read this book. I saw the movie, whatever it was, 15 years ago and I had never thought to, to read the book before. And I didn’t go back and re watch the film, but my memory of the film is that it is quite different than the book. I don’t know if you had that same experience.

Sonya Kelly: Yeah, I mean, I think it was one of those movies that it couldn’t quite capture the magic of the book and the gesture of the book. you know, sometimes you have these wonderful moments when you read something. I remember reading Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and going “oh please don’t ever turn that into a film.”

And, and it was, but it, I think the adaptation understood that the camera was the prose. And in this, the, the gesture of the book having been written, it doesn’t have the same emotional place as a movie. So I didn’t watch it either. I read the book again, but,

MK: Yeah. Yeah. It’s that thing that, you know, the old thing, right? The book was better than the movie most of the time. And, and I think part of that is because the act of reading is so internal. And this book in particular is about the internal life of a person and, and it continuing to exist beyond the moment when, you know, physical activity is nullified.

And I think that’s, what’s so amazing about this is that you see this person’s inner life, and it’s a really rich inner life, full of wit and pride and anger and lust and my feeling about my memory of the movie was more that it was about the relationship with the person who’s translating for him and his memories of things in the past.