What's Eating Gilbert Grape?

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I’ll start with the Grape children. For starters, Ellen, the youngest Grape, was so annoying in the book! There are the weird comments she makes which I mentioned, but she is also just so lazy and unhelpful. Amy and Gilbert have to do so much and any time she is asked to help in some way all she does is complain and make smart alec remarks. She is also very social and is always going out on dates and with friends. The movie shows all this to some extent, but not as much as the book. She also doesn’t help much with Arnie, and one day Amy asks her to go get him because he is somewhere in town. Gilbert is driving by and sees her literally dragging him. Gilbert gets out of the car and yells at her for having treated Arnie so poorly. This scene is shown in the movie, but she is trying to get Arnie away from the water tower and is being rough with him; which makes a bit more sense because getting him away from the tower was important. Whereas in the book she was being rough with him because she was simply losing patience. The book also talks about how when there is a crowd, she will act like she is the most doting sister to Arnie. So just an all around lazy fake.

What's eating Gilbert Grape? His dads dead, his mom, the "walrus", is eatting herself to death, his little sister is a bitch, a slut, and an abnoxioyusly devout christian, his brother is a "retard" (his word not mine), his friends are all idiots, his job is a complete dead end, his love interests are a 40ish year old mom or a 15 year old weirdo (Glibert is 24), the town he lives in is slowly dying, and there's absolutly nothing he can to do about any of it. So, what's eating Gilbert Grape? EVERYTHING!!! Everything is eating Gilbert Grape. Hedges’s most promising story lines involve Gilbert’s obese mother, Bonnie, and intellectually handicapped brother, Arnie. I was therefore most disappointed that he didn’t develop these characters, especially Bonnie, as well as he could. By the book’s exhilaratingly luminous ending . . . we have already been mesmerized.” — The Philadelphia InquirerAs the story unfolds, the readers learn about the many secrets that the family has or "the skeletons that they have in their closet." Gilbert has an obese mother that is a recluse and a father that committed suicide in the basement of the house when Gilbert was seven years old. Gilbert has two older sisters, an older brother, a younger sister and a younger brother. His younger brother, Arnie, is also retarded. While all the children have the same mother and father, each of the Grape children has their own personality and plays their own role in the family. I am not even kidding. Yes, I am a librarian and have been for a really long time and still, I had no idea this was a book. In the book there is a scene between him and Momma where she is unhappy with her life, but it doesn’t end up being as touching a scene as this one is in the movie. In the book she talks about how she is making the floor sink in and how her kids all want to kill each other. She then tells Gilbert to tell her he hates her. He is hesitant, but she pushes him to so then he says it. After he says it, it reads, “Momma’s eyes seem to swell. She looks at me hard and long. She thought she was going to enjoy my hate, but it has broken her. I can’t watch, so I barrel out of the house.” And this happened a couple days before she died. He never apologizes or brings it up though, because she did literally ask for him to say it. Over many bottles of beer -- and accompanied by the songs of Sinatra and Elvis -- the Grape children gather around Momma's body to perform a makeshift memorial service. What is happening here? Discuss the characters' tacit decision to burn the house down. In addition to their wish to avoid the embarrassment and humiliation of having all of Endora gather to watch Momma's body removed from the house by a crane, what might the destruction of the house represent to the Grapes?

It makes the movie make a lot more sense. I liked the movie quite well (I did see that when it came out; I also just watched it the other night for the sake of comparison and if it said "Based on the book by Peter Hedges" in the beginning, I missed it both the first time and when I watched it again on Friday) but I like the book a lot better. It's much more nuanced, the relationships between everyone are deeper, more real, more painful. I could relate with Book Gilbert far better than I could with Movie Gilbert and now I don't think Juliette Lewis was such a good choice. I will get straight to it and say I like the book better. The movie is a great adaptation though, and there are some changes they made I liked. I just really loved how we could better see the changes made in Gilbert in the book and were able to see in his head. I also liked the more fleshed out characters books always have.

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The book was a huge success for Hedges, catapulting him into the limelight of the literary world. It was subsequently adapted from a screenplay written by Hedges himself into an equally successful motion picture in 1993. The movie received multiple accolades and saw Leonardo di Caprio nominated for his first oscar in 1994. Hedges continues to write books and movies, often focusing on relationships within the family such as the famous "About A Boy" published in 1998 and adapted in 2002. Update this section!