Teenagers & Adolescence

Shields died July 17, 2003, of breast cancer. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her best-selling novel The Stone Diaries. Her books are often about middle class people leading quiet lives. Her other novels include Larry's Party, which won Britain's Orange Prize, The Republic of Love and Swann: A Mystery. She also wrote a biography of Jane Austen as well as plays, poetry and story collections. In 1998 Shields was diagnosed with breast cancer. At the time of the interview, she was in stage 4, a late stage of the disease. Her most recent novel, Unless, was written after her diagnosis.

Maureen Corrigan reviews Breaking Her Fall by Stephen Goodwin.

Film critic David Edelstein reviews Thirteen, starring Holly Hunter and Evan Rachel Wood.

The Pernice Brothers' album, Yours, Mine & Ours, was one of the most acclaimed of 2003. Joe Pernice's new book, Meat is Murder, is part of a collection of short books inspired by music albums. The book's title comes from the album of the same name by The Smiths.

His new novel is Screaming With the Cannibals. Maynard has been an assignment writer for Reader's Digest for over a decade. He's also written for many other magazines and newspapers. Screaming with the Cannibals is a sequel to his 1988 debut novel, Crum.

The stage actress and acting coach died Wednesday at the age of 84. She taught for more than 40 years, training actors including Jack Lemmon, Sigourney Weaver, Matthew Broderick and the late Geraldine Page. She and her late husband, Herbert Berghof, founded the HB Studio in New York. This interview first aired Nov. 4, 1998.

She wrote the screenplay for the new movie Mean Girls. It's based on the book, Queen Bees and Wannabes, by Rosalind Wiseman. Fey also co-stars in the film, along with Lindsay Lohan, Tim Meadows, Amy Poehler and Ana Gasteyer. Fey is co-head writer and writing supervisor for Saturday Night Live. She is the show's first female head writer. She also co-hosts SNL's Weekend Update. She and the writing staff won an Emmy Award for their work in 2002. Before SNL, Fey wrote and performed for the famed Second City in Chicago.

Film critic David Edelstein reviews Mean Girls. Saturday Night Live's Tina Fey wrote the screenplay, based on the book Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and other Realities of Adolescence.

Miriam Toews has written her third book, A Complicated Kindness. One reviewer called it "a kind of Catcher in the Rye for Mennonite girls."

Her new movie, which she wrote and directed, is The Ballad of Jack and Rose, starring Miller's husband, Daniel Day-Lewis, along with Camilla Belle and Catherine Keener. It's about an aging hippie father and his daughter who are living on an abandoned commune but come face-to-face with the contemporary world. Miller is the daughter of the legendary playwright Arthur Miller.

The new film from director Todd Solondz, Palindromes, begins with a funeral for Dawn Weiner, the memorable, much-maligned 11-year-old from the 1995 Solondz film Welcome to the Dollhouse. The main character of the new film is Dawn's cousin, but she's played by seven different and distinct actors.

Writer, actor, lawyer Edwin John Wintle has written his first book, a memoir about what happened when his 13-year old niece came to live with him. His book is Breakfast with Tiffany: An Uncle's Memoir.

Paul Feig is the creator of the cult classic TV series Freaks and Geeks. His new book Superstud: Or How I Became a 24-Year-Old Virgin, is the follow-up to his 2002 book Kick Me: Adventures in Adolescence. Feig was an actor before moving on to writing for TV and film.

Leisure suits, big hair and the Bee Gees are just part of the draw of a new book, Bar Mitzvah Disco. With essays from Jonathan Safran Foer, Sarah Silverman and others, the book documents bar and bat mitzvahs from the 1970s through the '90s.

Our film critic reviews Down in the Valley, the new film by writer/director David Jacobson, starring Edward Norton, David Morse, and Bruce Dern.

Coach Bill Resler and former player Devon Crosby Helms are at the heart of the basketball documentary The Heart of the Game. The film follows the Roosevelt High School Roughriders, a Seattle-area girls' team, for six seasons.

Writer and producer Ed Burns draws on his experience as a former Baltimore detective to create the acclaimed HBO series The Wire, now in its fourth season. It's a crime drama with a central theme of surveillance technology used to capture drug dealers.

Jason Reitman's new teen comedy Juno, like Knocked Up, disguises its family-values stance with a liberal helping of four-letter words. Film critic David Edelstein says it's targeted firmly at the tweener crowd, and the relentless banter of Buffy the Vampire Slayer gets taken to a new level here. But every character's wisecracks, as in bad Neil Simon, come from the same place.

When a Portland teenager accidentally kills a security guard at the local skate park, he pulls into himself rather than talking to the police. Gus Van Sant's film explores the teen's thoughts and actions in a free-form style that critic David Edelstein calls "a raging success."

Film critic David Edelstein reviews the new documentary American Teen. Directed by Nanette Burnstein, the film follows a group of seniors at a high school in Warsaw, Indiana.