Marissa Jo Cerar adapts E.L. Westbury debut novel 'Drowning in Paper Flowers' for television
Television writer and showrunner Marissa Jo Cerar is developing E.L. Westbury's novel Drowning in Paper Flowers for the screen, with Jenna Bush Hager and Ben Spector of Thousand Voices producing alongside Universal Global Television (Deadline).
The novel follows Ruby Powell, a middle-aged housewife in Dallas whose polished exterior conceals marital dissatisfaction, maternal inadequacy, and a growing dependence on anti-anxiety medication triggered by recurring nightmares. It is the kind of character-driven, interior story that could sit well with Cerar's track record, though the project is still in development, meaning no pilot or series order has been confirmed.
Drowning in Paper Flowers took an unusual path to publication. Westbury self-published the novel through Pink Crustacean Press on 24 December 2024, running 432 pages. The book then sold to Atria Books in a seven-figure North American deal following a competitive auction — a striking outcome for a debut that began outside the traditional publishing system (Deadline). UK and Commonwealth rights went to Orion, part of Hachette UK, and translation rights have sold in six languages.
Atria and Orion launched the novel's major edition on 11 August 2026, a 384-page hardback with ISBN 9781668270769 (Simon & Schuster). Westbury is represented by WME.
Cerar is an NAACP Image Award winner and two-time Humanitas Prize recipient. She began her career as a writer-producer on Netflix's 13 Reasons Why, Fox's Shots Fired, and Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale, before creating and showrunning ABC's Women of the Movement and Hulu's Black Cake — both adaptations of books themselves (Deadline).
On the producing side, Bush Hager and Thousand Voices are represented by UTA and operate under a first-look deal with Universal Studio Group — an arrangement that gives Universal right of first refusal on projects they bring in (Deadline). That deal structure places the adaptation squarely within Universal's orbit from the outset.
What gives this project its shape is the combination: a writer who has built her career turning novels into series, a book that moved from self-publishing to a seven-figure auction in under two years, and a production pipeline already connected to a major studio group. For a story about a woman whose carefully maintained life is cracking at the seams, the pieces are in place. Whether it reaches a screen depends on the next step — a network or streamer deciding to order it.
