Nicole Kidman in The Family Fang

Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen in HBO’s Hemingway and Gellhorn.

After watching Nicole Kidman throw back the booze with the best of them in HBO’s Hemingway and Gellhorn, I’m ready to follow the actress anywhere.

Or almost anywhere. Kidman’s next project may be a movie based on the 2011 novel The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson. Which makes sense, because as I was reading it I thought it would make a pretty good movie. The book has a light, movie-ready premise – the grown-up children of two performance artists try to make sense of their childhoods, in which they were involved in their parents’ crazy projects, which also involved an unsuspecting public and run-ins with the law. And the daughter character, Annie Fang, is an actress.

A movie based on a novel about the grown-up children of two American performance artists may be Nicole Kidman’s next project.

In fact, The Family Fang might be a better movie than a book. I gave up three-quarters of the way through, when my interest in the characters and their situation waned, and Wilson seemed to run out of lines and good jokes – the fifth or sixth reference to Annie Fang’s boob-baring incident on a movie set, which happens at the start of the novel, is a tell-tale sign the author’s well had run dry.

So yeah, perfect for Hollywood…