Chummy mummies Eckler and Ehm to collaborate on kids’ book

Q&Q‘s Deals page is on a holiday break, but we would be remiss if we didn’t mention this deal, from The Globe and Mail‘s “The Biz” column:

Rebecca Eckler has signed a deal for two novels with Key Porter Books. The first, Private School Confidential, is due in 2009. Eckler and Erica Ehm are also collaborating on a children’s book, Mischievous Moms, for Key Porter.

Is it just us, or do both Private School Confidential and Mischievous Moms sound like titles of books kept at the back of the store, just beyond the beaded curtain and the “Adults Only” sign?

Everybody get knocked up

If Judd Apatow’s and Rebecca Eckler’s lawyers weren’t already going to spend a lot of time debating whether tales of drunken insemination constitute intellectual property (see here for context), a new up-knocking contender is about to enter the field.

In October, Avery, a imprint of Putnam in the U.S., will be publishing Louise Sloan’s Knock Yourself Up: A Tell-All Guide to Becoming a Single Mom. The book, which is being marketed with the tag-line “No Man? No Problem!,” is part memoir and part how-to guide, though that latter part will probably not feature frozen daquiris in quite the same measure as either Apatow’s film or Eckler’s book.

Eckler vs. Hollywood

The hit Hollywood comedy Knocked Up opened this past weekend to rave reviews and big box office. The movie is about a couple dealing with an unplanned pregnancy, and whatever the film’s strengths, no one could dispute that its premise is an old and well-worn one.

Except Canadian author Rebecca Eckler, who thinks they stole it from her.

In a long article in the latest Maclean’s, Eckler argues that the movie’s writer-director, Judd Apatow, ripped off her 2004 memoir of the same name, and explains that she’s suing Apatow and Universal Studios. The piece isn’t available online, but here are some of Eckler’s smoking guns:

The movie Knocked Up features a woman named Alison who becomes pregnant after getting drunk. While she gets drunk going out celebrating a promotion at work, I got drunk, and knocked up, celebrating at my engagement party. Both my book and the movie feature one night of passion and the nine months that follow. Fine. Whatever. But what got me was the fact that “Alison” was an up-and-coming television reporter; in my book I was an up-and-coming newspaper reporter.

Also, Eckler had a friend with kids, and the Alison character has a sister with kids. And both book and movie have scenes with multiple pregnancy tests. And, a-ha, the father in the movie is a Jewish Canadian, just like the father of Eckler’s child. (And, um, also just like Seth Rogen, the actor who plays the film father.)

Maybe it’s just Quillblog, but this nonsense seems equivalent to one mystery writer suing another because both of their books open with mysterious murders, or because both of their cop heroes tend to buck departmental bureaucracy. A warning to comedy writers out there: if you’re working on a gag in which someone has to buy something embarrassing at the supermarket and the cashier calls for a price check on the store PA system, you better make sure Eckler hasn’t used that one – if she has, she’ll think you nicked it from her.

Oh, and in her Maclean’s piece Eckler refers to an infamous e-mail blowout between Apatow and another TV producer, Mark Brazill, implying that the dispute is evidence of Apatow’s thieving ways. Readers should probably check out the whole thing and decide for themselves, though.

Finally, on a completely unrelated note, the very same issue of Maclean’s has an article called “Courting trouble with misblurbs,” about an interesting legal development in the U.K.: “Misquote a critic to sell more tickets or books, and you could face jail time in Britain.”

Fun with blurbs (Rebecca Eckler edition)

The other day a finished copy of Rebecca Eckler’s new memoir, Wiped, arrived here at the Q&Q home office, complete with a press release that included some admiring blurbs of Eckler’s first book, Knocked Up. A couple of those caught Quillblog’s attention and seemed to bear further investigation. So for comparative purposes:

From the Key Porter press release:

“This mommy memoir feels like a humorous crash course in maturity.” – PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

The full sentence in the original review (you can see the complete review here, under “Editorial Reviews”):

Sometimes this mommy memoir feels like a humorous crash course in maturity, though at other points the author’s attitude comes dangerously close to that of one who has a baby as a chic accessory.

From the Key Porter press release:

“A downtown girl attempts a stylish switch to yummy mommy. There appears to be no detail she’s reluctant to share. This isn’t supposed to be a parenting manual; it’s meant to be a funny, lighthearted take on life in transition! – THE TORONTO STAR

Really? An exclamation mark after transition? Well, no. Here’s the full Star piece, with the blurbed bits in bold:

In which a downtown girl attempts a stylish switch to yummy mommy
Rebecca Eckler is the poster girl for a younger generation of self-absorbed Toronto columnists whose favourite subject is, well, themselves. As one of the “kids” hired by the National Post, Eckler is apparently of the belief that the trials and travails of a young woman in the social swirl of the local media pack is of pressing interest. Now, one has to give a kind of grudging nod to Eckler’s enthusiasm, whatever one thinks of the content of her work. There appears to be no private detail she’s reluctant to share, from her sex life to her difficulty with such challenges as getting up on time and balancing her chequebook. So it’s perhaps unfair to have hoped for anything from Eckler in the way of serious contemplation of the grownup life in Knocked Up: Confessions Of A Modern Mother-to-be (Anchor Canada, 374 pages, $22.95), her diary of last year’s pregnancy and the birth of baby Rowan. This isn’t supposed to be a parenting manual; it’s meant to be a funny, lighthearted take on a life in transition. And if you look closely, you may find encouraging evidence, amid all the fretting about weight gain and the benefits of an elective C-section, that wee Rowan may yet be in responsible hands. Eckler, a week after her baby is born, reads a piece a certain Sexy Young Intern has written about a new bar that features waitresses who dance on the bar counter. Somebody skinnier is muscling in on her beat! “I have a baby now, and bar hopping seems, well, not so important to me anymore,” Eckler ponders. “She can have my old job, I think. I barely have time to read the newspaper anyway.”

Read Q&Q‘s review of Wiped here.