The Same River Twice Honoring the Difficult : a Meditation on Life, Spirit, Art, and the Making of the Film, The Color Purple, Ten Years Later

In the early 1980s, The Color Purple was a runaway success, it had won the Pulitzer Prize and Steven Spielberg was making the book into a film. backlash as she became the object of attacks both personal and political. to black male and female relationships; and that her ideas about equality were harmful to the black community. Such was the ferocity of these attacks that she left her own community north of San Francisco and sought refuge in Mexico. Walker herself fell gravely ill with the extremely debilitating condition, Lyme disease. To add to the trauma, her partner of many years announced he'd been having an affair. describes the experience of watching the film being made as she weathered the controversy surrounding it and came to terms with the changes in her own life.