But holidays are made for reading...

... especially when the temperatures with the humidex reaches over 40 degrees Celsius. The title of this post comes from the song "Things to Forget" by Sarah Harmer. It always runs through my head when I spend a good deal of time reading during my holidays.

This post is going to be about the book that I'm currently reading and how I discovered it. Summertime usually allows me to discover some weird true story that I become a little bit obsessed with. Last year, it was the story of Jackie O's eccentric and destitute cousins that is portrayed in the movie "Grey Gardens". I highly recommend that movie. It was made last year for HBO and stars Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange.

I discovered this year's odd obsession when a friend of mine sent me a link to a Futurama episode that has something to do with iPhones (I haven't watched it yet). The site had all kinds of other TV shows on it, and I started to watch an episode of "The United States of Tara" that stars Toni Collette. It's about a suburban wife and mother that has multiple personalities. It was all right, but it got me to thinking about some women with multiple personalities who had written a book that I saw on Oprah when I was a kid. I started doing some googling so I could see if I could find out what happened to her. My research lead me to Sybil, who is an early case of multiple personalities before the woman on Oprah.

Sybil is a book about a woman with multiple personalities written by a journalist. It is based largely upon her treatment by her psychiatrist and her own experiences. It was made into two made-for-TV movies: a 1976 adaptation starring Sally Field, and a 2007 version.

I found the Sally Field version on YouTube in 19 parts. I started to watch it and became hooked. First of all, they don't make movies like this anymore. It was originally shown on two nights, so it's pretty long (3 hrs). This gave a lot of time for character/setting development. I found that the movie was really detailed, and at first I thought "man, this is slow" but at the end I appreciated it because I got to know the character(s) and how she lived. Her apartment was featured a lot, and I feel like I got to know it, and its posters of cats, very well.

Sally Field is a really amazing actress in it. She does a great job of portraying Sybil and her other personalities. All together Sybil had 16 personalities, but only maybe six were shown in the movie. But Sally did a great job of showing the differences between them. Oh and the scenes with Sybil's mother were super creepy! I recommend the 1976 version of the movie, but only if you have time and patience.

I tried to watch the 2007 version which is much shorter but I couldn't really get into it. I will give it another shot, but frankly, I missed Sally.

I wasn't quite ready to leave the world of Sybil and her other personalities, so I decided to pick up the book. According to the cover, the book was a huge bestseller back in the 70s. I am LOVING it! It's non-fiction, but it reads like a novel, and it's very well done. I'm about halfway through, and it's obviously way more in-depth than the movie. I think the movie was a good adaptation, but I'm enjoying getting to know the story more through the book.

And that's the strange reading that I've been doing in the heat of my holidays. But seriously, I so love discovering some neat story that was always there just waiting for me to find it in some random way.