Jocelyn Moorhouse's film is an adaptation of a wildly popular novel by Rosalie Ham of the same name, which came out in 2000. It was Ham's first novel and was well-reviewed at the time of its release, with many critics praising its wild sense of the fantastical, its deft grasp of the unusual and dark, and its emotionally rich plot arc.
Ham's novel is very similar to the film that Moorhouse created, though she gave Moorhouse full permission to take liberties with the source material. In an interview with Daily Bloid, Ham said of her inspiration for the book, "My mother was a seamstress and as a child I observed that a new frock could make someone a little more proud, a little more pleased with themselves, and so these things were the seed for my thoughts on the destructive power of gossip, lies and vanity." She also discussed her involvement in Moorhouse's film: "I know too little about adapting a novel to screen, and so I handed it over to the experts. Jocelyn had made an excellent film called Proof (2005). It was a film about a blind photographer and so I knew that Jocelyn would be able to adapt my story with its collision of comedy and tragedy and the resulting irony. These are elements of style that could have been very badly interpreted but I trusted Jocelyn, and I also trusted the producer of the film, Sue Maslin, whose vision for the film met my story perfectly. Sue and I were both raised in the same small community and we went to school together, so Sue understood the story."
Moorhouse's film did not receive the same praise that Ham's novel did, but it did spark a release of a new edition of the novel by Penguin Books in 2015. The novel was also nominated for many awards at the time of its first publication. Ham continues to write novels.
