How do you adapt East of Eden for screen?

Ask Penguin

In this episode of Ask Penguin, host Rhianna Dhillon sits down with co-showrunners Zoe Kazan and Jeb Stuart to discuss the intricate process of adapting John Steinbeck's 1952 epic novel East of Eden into a

Key takeaways

• Zoe Kazan and Jeb Stuart adapted John Steinbeck's East of Eden into a seven-part Netflix series that re-centers the narrative around Cathy Ames (played by Florence Pugh).
• The showrunners heavily relied on Steinbeck's unpublished correspondence, Letters from Eden, to understand his shifting perception of Cathy from 'monster' to a deeply human figure.

Main topics

• Book-to-screen adaptation strategy
• Re-centering Cathy Ames as the narrative anchor

Notable quotes

"I think one of the great pleasures for me as a viewer is to feel like whoever is making the thing that I'm receiving trusts me to make up my own mind and have my own experience."

Conclusion

The episode offers a masterclass in literary adaptation, demonstrating how deep

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:02) Hello and welcome to Ask Penguin, the podcast about books and the people who write and publish them. I'm Rhianna Dillon and in this episode, we're doing things a little differently. This week, I'm thrilled to be joined by some of the team behind Netflix's adaptation of East of Eden, co-showrunner, writer and executive producer Zoe Kazan and co-showrunner and executive producer Jeb Stewart. Written in 1952, East of Eden was considered by John Steinbeck to be his masterpiece. Everything else I've written has been, in a sense, a practice for this, he said. East of Eden is a breathtakingly moving and at times brutal novel that follows two families, the Trasks and the Hamiltons, across generations as they grapple with questions of identity, ambition and love. Part family saga, part biblical retelling. It spans more than 600 gripping pages, all told in Steinbeck's deceptively simple yet richly evocative language. Now the story has been adapted once again, this time as a seven-part series told through the lens of the novel's female protagonist, Cathy, also known as Kate. Now before we hear from Zoe and Jeb, we thought we'd share an extract from the East of Eden audiobook to whet your appetite. Have a listen. Speaker 3 (1:25) Adam Trask grew up in grayness, and the curtains of his life were like dusty cobwebs. In his days, a slow file of half sorrows and sick dissatisfactions. And then, through Kathy, the glory came to him. Speaker 3 (1:45) It doesn't matter that Kathy was what I have called a monster. Perhaps we can understand Kathy. But on the other hand, we are capable of many things in all directions, of great virtues and great sins. And who in his mind has not probed the black water? Speaker 3 (2:08) Maybe we all have in us a secret pond where evil and ugly things germinate and grow strong. Speaker 3 (2:16) But this culture is fenced, and the swimming brood climbs up only to fall back. Speaker 3 (2:23) Might it not be that in the dark pools of some men, the evil grows strong enough to wriggle over the fence and swim free? Speaker 3 (2:33) Would not such a man be our monster? And are we not related to him in our hidden water? It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils since we invented them. Speaker 3 (2:50) Whatever Kathy may have been, she set off the glory in Adam. His spirit rose flying and released him from fear and bitterness and rancid memories. Speaker 3 (3:02) The glory lights up the world and changes it the way a star shell changes a battleground. Perhaps Adam did not see Kathy at all. So lighted was she by his eyes. Burned in his mind was an image of beauty and tenderness, a sweet and holy girl, precious beyond thinking, clean and loving, and that image was Kathy to her husband. And nothing Kathy did or said could warp Adam's Kathy. Speaker 1 (3:34) Hello, both of you. How are you? Hi. Thank you so much for joining us on Ask Penguin. It's really great to have you both on. Now, I want to start by asking you about the first time that you discovered the work of John Steinbeck, and particularly East of Eden, and the impact that it had on you. Jeb, let's start with you. Oh, Speaker 4 (3:51) wow. Well, it's one of the few novels that I've read, you know, multiple times over my life. It has different meanings at different times. You know, you read it when you're in high school, or if you're an English major. You may read it again in your, you know, your 30s. And, you know, so I've read it multiple times. So it was really strange. I just read it about two years before Zoe and I met. Speaker 3 (4:12) But Speaker 4 (4:13) it's, for me, having read a lot of Steinbeck, it's his opus. It's so much more than all of his other novels. So you can approach it and find something new every time you read it. Speaker 2 (4:23) Yeah. Yeah, I... I think I was assigned Grapes of Wrath in school, and I then went to my parents' bookshelves and looked for everything else that I could find written by Steinbeck. I think Travels with Charlie was my favorite until I read this. And when I read East of Eden, it kind of blew me away. It's a very odd book. Like, it has all of these. autobiographical passages and philosophical musings and there are things in it like there's a chapter about his mother Olive going up in an airplane for the first time. It's like what is that doing in this book? All these things that are not connected to plot and I think I read it at a period in my life when I was starting to read with an eye towards authorial intention and not just towards plot and character. But I was blown away by the character of Kathy Ames and I felt like I had never read anyone like her. And I don't know. Some books just stay with you. Jane Eyre did this for me too. It's not even about so much loving the book as it is that it sort of like dogs Speaker 1 (5:22) you. Speaker 4 (5:23) Right. Yeah. Speaker 1