“Valentine is set in the seventies, but it couldn’t be more relevant today, as it centers around finding the courage to stand up for the truth, even when it means facing the outrage of your own kind.”
HBO is developing an adaptation of Elizabeth Wetmore’s first novel, Valentine, as a limited series with Salma Hayek and My Brilliant Friend executive producer Jennifer Schuur. According to Deadline, HBO won the rights to the book after it was published in March 2020 and debuted at number two on the New York Times bestsellers list. Schuur will write the pilot and will executive produce with Salma Hayek, Jose Tamez, who runs Hayek’s Ventanarosa Productions, and author Wetmore.
Valentine begins on Valentine’s Day, 1976, in the West Texas town of Odessa. It is told through a cast of women whose lives change when a fourteen-year-old Mexican girl is beaten and raped by a white oilfield worker.
Jennifer Schuur said, “Crimes against women and certainly against women of color are nothing new, but Elizabeth Wetmore has given us a story that explores this truth in a way that is profoundly intimate while also being an undeniable social and cultural critique. To be able to walk that entire landscape alongside partners HBO and Salma Hayek who so deeply connect to the material as well is more than I could’ve hoped for when I first fell in love with Valentine.”
Salma Hayek added, “What a thrill to be working with HBO and Jennifer Schuur, whose powerful voicing of the female spirit has captivated me in all her previous work. Valentine is set in the seventies, but it couldn’t be more relevant today, as it centers around finding the courage to stand up for the truth, even when it means facing the outrage of your own kind.”
Valentine was named in Lone Star Lit's Best of Texas for 2020. You can read our review here: https://www.lonestarliterary.com/content/lone-star-review-valentine.
Elizabeth Wetmore is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her fiction has appeared in Epoch, Kenyon Review, Colorado Review, Baltimore Review, Crab Orchard Review, Iowa Review, and other literary journals. She is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and two fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, as well as a grant from the Barbara Deming Foundation. She was also a Rona Jaffe Scholar in Fiction at Bread Loaf and a Fellow at the MacDowell Colony, and one of six Writers in Residence at Hedgebrook. A native of West Texas, she lives and works in Chicago.
