FARRAH MAFFAI Meg Cabot, author of The Princess Diaries, speaks to a crowd of fans at the East Brunswick Public Library Nov. 6.
pays visit to E.B. Library
By vincent todaro
Staff Writer
EAST BRUNSWICK — Her life was so boring, she decided to lie in her own diary. And she made her story so interesting, Disney made it into a film.
Meg Cabot, author of the book, The Princess Diaries, upon which Disney based its movie of the same name, spoke at the East Brunswick Public Library Nov. 6, telling children and parents just how she got the idea for the book, and also about the long journey that led to writing it.
Cabot spoke for about an hour while wearing the robe and crown of Princess Mia Thermopolis, the main character in the book.
However, Cabot said the road that led her to creating her breakthrough book was anything but royal. Her original ambition was to be a veterinarian, but she scored so low on the math portion of the SAT that her hopes of going to veterinary school were dashed.
"Basically you’re looking at a broken shell of a human being," she said, half joking, "because I wanted to be a vet."
Ironically, her father was a math professor.
"‘I don’t understand how you can be my daughter and you can’t multiply fractions,’" she recalled him telling her.
Disappointed, she turned her attention to acting, then art — "another high-paying career," she joked.
When her career as an illustrator didn’t work out, she began working as an assistant manager for an undergraduate dormitory at New York University. She recalled the 700 students who lived in the dorms did "very little sleeping and a lot of breathing."
As if not humbled enough, she then realized her widowed mother was dating one of her professors. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back, she said.
"I started writing down how I was upset," she said, adding that she had kept a diary since she was a little girl growing up in southern Indiana. However, she found her own existence so boring that she began to make up things to make her diary more interesting.
"I was basically lying in my own diary," she said.
She made herself into a 14-year-old for her diary entries, instead of "a 30-year-old writing about my mother dating the teacher."
She began to get more serious about her writing, all the while still working at NYU, and started contacting publishers. However, a friend one day gave her a bit of advice on her writing.
" ‘Why don’t you write a book about a princess?’ " she was asked.
"I was too lazy to start a new book," she said, so she simply interpolated the princess into her diary and used it as the basis for the book.
"I sent the book around to every publisher in New York, and they all hated it," she said.
Perhaps not indoctrinated yet into the ways of book publishers, one new hire at Harper Collins liked the book enough that she wanted to go with it.
There was, however, some cold reality to diminish Meg’s initial excitement.
"We can’t pay you much money, or do any publicity," the woman told her.
It didn’t matter though, as the phone call that would change her life was just around the corner.
Disney called her and liked the book so much it was going to pay her — as she said, with a "really, really, really, really, big check," to base a movie on it.
"I said ‘Okay.’ "
She quit the college job and began working more on her writing, when Disney called her with what it considered to be an improvement — it wanted to take the father out of the story.
Disney told her Julie Andrews was interested in being in the movie, and if the father was killed off, there would be room for additional lines for her.
Still thrilled with the idea of her book becoming a movie, Cabot — who had already used her check to buy a new television "to watch Friends," agreed.
Still not through with its changes, Disney then said that Garry Marshall, the brother of Laverne and Shirley star Penny Marshall — wanted to direct the film. However, instead of having it set in New York, he preferred San Francisco.
She told Disney not to inform her about any further changes it made, so the first time she saw the finished product was actually at its Hollywood premiere.
She said she had never been to a Hollywood premiere before and was taken aback, especially by the stars she was rubbing elbows with, such as Anne Hathaway, Mandy Moore, Kirsten Dunst and Julie Andrews.
She said she was so nervous that she started to cry.
But her reaction was a little bit different once the movie began.
"I could not stop laughing at the movie," she said. "It was so weird to see these characters I had made up alive on this big movie screen."
Especially amusing to her was that Disney had paid a songwriter to create an anthem for a country she invented.
Cabot, who also writes under her formal name, Meghan, has written about 20 books, mainly for children, though there are some for adults too, she said.
Part four of The Princess Diaries will be on bookshelves this spring, she said, and the sequel to the first movie will begin filming this fall.

