The literary influences that go into a ‘Room’

Emma Donoghue is a sterling fiction writer. The multitudes that read her best-selling Room can attest to that. But she's also a serious student of literature -- the Dublin native got her Ph.D. from Cambridge -- and storytelling in general. And she loves to talk about her influences.

Room is now a movie, whose screenplay Donoghue adapted from her own novel. It tells the story of a young woman (Brie Larson) abducted and locked in her captor's gardening shed, which she now shares with her 5-year-old son (Jacob Tremblay). It's the only room he's ever known. She's determined it won't be the last.

Donoghue recently came through Dallas for a preview screening, which gave us the chance to discuss some of the works that inspired her to write Room. The film opens Friday.

We Need to Talk About Kevin -- Lionel Shriver's novel, which was also turned into a film, details a fraught mother-son relationship that culminates in disaster. "I love books that tell the truth about parenthood," Donoghue says. "It's such a sentimentalized subject, but when I joke around with other parents who are friends, people will admit to all sorts of bad moments. I noticed my kids have picked up the phrase 'bad mommy moment' because it's something I mutter after I've accidentally knocked one of them over or said something really mean. Once the kids are commenting on your parenting. the whole thing becomes very meta-textual."

Finding Nemo -- The Pixar classic, which will soon have a sequel, showcases parental anxiety in the form of a clown fish looking for his lost son. "That's the first film we saw after our son was born, and we were just so moved by the plight of Nemo's father," Donoghue says. "That's the perverse thing about literature: We are constantly making kids into orphans or separating them from their parents, because that's the only way you get a story. If they were totally safe, nothing would happen, and even with real kids, you have to let them have some adventures but hopefully not end up in the emergency rooms. It's a constant loosening of the reins and then tightening them again."

The Road -- Cormac McCarthy's sparse, post-apocalyptic fable raises the father-son bond to the highest possible stakes. "I read The Road on the only resort holiday I've ever taken, so I was lying on a padded four-poster bed on a beautiful beach in Costa Rica, reading The Road and sobbing over it," Donoghue says. "I thought, this is such a great kind of father-son legend, and then I thought, what would a mother-child story be? I thought about a story of enclosure and breaking out, and then I started thinking about all those legends like Rapunzel and Perseus."

Ponyo -- This fantasy from Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki tells of a 5-year-old boy who falls for a goldfish princess. "I love the fact that she turns from fish to girl," Donoghue says. "Kids are so alien and they're so different from us, even though we each began as one. Stories like Ponyo manage to capture that sense of 'Wow! What is this creature?' So do fairy tales like, say, Thumbelina. The idea that there's this tiny, tiny child that's so different from you and yet you somehow have to keep it safe. ... I think sometimes you need quite an extreme story to try to capture very everyday truths."