Hollywood has found its next best seller to option. Deadline reported today that FX won a reported ten-party bidding war to secure the rights to Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s novel Fleishman Is in Trouble. It’s about a man named Toby Fleishman, whose marriage of 15 years has ended and he finally feels like he’s getting a handle on life during his “summer of sexual emancipation” when his ex drops off their two kids and never comes back. Then, “as Toby tries to figure out where Rachel went, all while juggling his patients at the hospital, his never-ending parental duties, and his new app-assisted sexual popularity, his tidy narrative of the spurned husband with the too-ambitious wife is his sole consolation. But if Toby ever wants to truly understand what happened to Rachel and what happened to his marriage, he is going to have to consider that he might not have seen things all that clearly in the first place.”
Brodesser-Akner, an award-winning journalist before becoming a best-selling novelist, will adapt her book for the limited-series show and will also executive produce. In a comment to Vulture, she said, “Holy shit, can you believe this?” Brodesser-Akner has sold her second novel, Long Island Compromise, to Random House.
