Bad Wolf, the producer of “The Night Of” for HBO, “A Discovery of Witches” for Sky, and “His Dark Materials” for BBC and HBO, has optioned rights for the book “Coming Undone” by Terri White, editor-in-chief of Empire magazine, in a deal with Anna Pallai at AMP Literary.
The production company, led by former BBC executives Jane Tranter and Julie Gardner, has secured the option for the “honest and unflinching memoir” – published by Canongate this summer – which “documents her life unravelling as a successful editor haunted by past events, and her precarious navigation back from a life in pieces,” according to a statement from Bad Wolf.
The book details the years spent battling between her outward image as an award-winning editor named one of Folio’s “Top Women in U.S. Media,” and her “inner reality darkened by past trauma, which lead her skidding towards a mental health crisis and into a locked psychiatric ward.”
As well as growing up in a household in poverty, White endured sexual and physical abuse at the hands of a number of her mother’s partners. “Her success defied expectations, but the greater the disparity between her outer achievements and inner demons, the more she struggled to hold everything together.”
Kate Crowther, exec producer at Bad Wolf, said “Coming Undone” is an “exceptional, powerful memoir,” adding “from the moment I read it I knew we were the right team to develop it.”
White said of Bad Wolf: “Their reputation for producing bold, brave, brilliant telly makes them the perfect home for my book – one I wrote to try and give a voice to what so many of us experience in the shadows.”