Bernardine Evaristo’s Novel Girl, Woman, Other Needs to Be an Anthology Series ASAP

Earlier this month, Bernardine Evaristo’s novel Girl, Woman, Other won the 2019 Booker Prize. Evaristo may have had to share the award with Margaret Atwood, whose sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments, was also honored, but the split prize doesn’t diminish Girl, Woman, Other’s status as one of the year’s most exciting novels.

Evaristo’s lifetime sales have already more than doubled since the Booker Prize win, but there’s another way Girl, Woman, Other should be recognized: with a TV show.

Television adaptations of literature have become commonplace. Books like Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies, Lindy West’s Shrill, and Sally Rooney’s Normal People have all been tapped for the small screen.

Evaristo’s book may seem like a less-than-obvious candidate for adaptation. Its unusual structure is a major part of its success as fiction—the book is divided into a series of twelve semi-linked stories narrated by twelve different characters—but twelve narrators are approximately eleven more than tends to work on TV. Not to be overlooked is the fact that Evaristo’s twelve protagonists run the gamut of race, gender identity, sexuality, and socioeconomic status, something that TV still struggles to reconcile, even as diversity remains an industry buzzword.

Girl, Woman, Other might not make a slam-dunk ABC sitcom, but the answer to our adaptation dreams might lie in the much-vaunted anthology series. Popularized by shows like American Horror Story and True Detective, anthology series shift the traditional balance of TV power by providing an opportunity for multiple narrators to bring us into their worlds; what writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie memorably referred to in a TED talk as “the danger of a single story” is mitigated by the format itself.

Girl, Woman, Other is far from the only complex piece of modern literature that deserves an adaptation—how great would it be to see Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous or Jaquira Díaz’s Ordinary Girls on TV?—and novels grappling with issues of race, sexuality, and gender have certainly begun to find a second life on the small screen, including Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere and Brit Bennett’s The Mothers.

Still, the prospect of seeing Evaristo’s work on-screen is particularly exciting because of the specificity of the worlds she describes. All twelve of Evaristo’s characters—there’s London-based black lesbian playwright Amma and her headstrong, unapologetically progressive aspiring-journalist daughter Yazz, as well as Amma’s best friend Dominique, who is trapped in an abusive relationship—overflow with irrepressible humanity. The character-driven Girl, Woman, Other is engaging mainly because of its attention to detail, which is a major characteristic of this year’s great shows: Characters like a nonbinary social media influencer and an ambitious grocery-store employee, who might be treated like stock clichés in lesser hands, are given the luxury of a full story in Girl, Woman, Other—no easy feat, given that each chapter spans roughly forty pages. At the risk of fawning, the only bad thing about Evaristo’s novel is that it, inevitably, ends; she’s so good at handcrafting a chain of linked stories that their final installment, which concludes with the sentence fragment “this is about being / together,” automatically feels abrupt.

An on-screen adaptation of Evaristo’s book would also allow twelve different actors of color (still sorely undervalued in Hollywood) to bring them to life. Who wouldn’t take that over yet another season of [insert brooding dramedy with a straight, cis white male protagonist here]?

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Originally Appeared on Vogue