“That age group is on sort of the precipice of figuring themselves out of learning to accept who they are… YA I think offers that view to somebody’s life where everything is open, everything’s a question. “What I’m interested in is mostly an emotional angle or a unique character,” he explains. The book is also not Freudenthal’s first foray into the YA genre, as his previous works include helming The Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters and episodes of the series The Tick. The director attributes the character’s unique voice and “how he deals with this rollercoaster” as the reason for wanting to bring Walton’s story to life. Walton’s book is formulated around journal entries written from Adam.

“I loved that there was a sort of tender, compassionate, funny tone where Adam gets at some of the really tough issues with self-deprecating humor which really functions as a weapon of sorts against his pain.”

But then the miracle drug begins to fail, and Adam will do anything to keep Maya from discovering his secret.“We could create a person onscreen that was neither a mad genius nor a violent criminal, who a lot of people could even see themselves in the way I did when I read the book,” he tells THR. When he meets Maya, a fiercely intelligent girl, he desperately wants to be the great guy that she thinks he is.

Suddenly everything seems possible, even love. As Adam starts fresh at a new school, he begins a drug trial that helps him ignore his visions. It should be easy to separate the real from the not real, but Adam can't. He sees and hears people who aren’t there: Rebecca, a beautiful girl who understands him the Mob Boss, who harasses him and Jason, the naked guy who’s unfailingly polite. Fans of More Happy Than Not, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and It’s Kind of a Funny Story will cheer for Adam as he struggles with schizophrenia in this brilliantly honest and unexpectedly funny debut.Īdam has just been diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Words on the bathroom walls book