Beverly Donofrio spoke Thursday afternoon to an audience of a little over 100 people about her memoir, Riding In Car With Boys, a book that caught theattention of Hollywood and was made into a movie.

Donofrio said she first wrote Riding In Cars With Boys for an assignment she had at Columbia Graduate School that required her to come up with 150 pages of novel writing.

“I flunked the assignment and failed Graduate School” Donofrio said.

She quit writing for a year after that and then told the audience about all the tough times she had went through.

She said she was hit by a car and bounced off the hood breaking her foot and putting her into shock.

This came to her as wake up call she said, because when she was hit, she didn?t have insurance or a wallet in her possession. If she had been killed, there would have been no way to identify her.

Despite this terrible accident she said, “Obstacles are stepping stones that only make you stronger.”

Whether people believe that things happen for a reason or not, Donofrio said she certainly did.

Riding In Cars with Boys took twelve years for it to be made into a movie and Donofrio said that she wasn?t very happy with the screenwriters because they were changing the content.

She said that one of the major changes was in the first scene, where they established a relationship with her father that labeled her as the apple of his eye.

This scene has her asking her dad to buy her a bra and Donofrio said that she would have never discussed matters like that with her father.

However, Donofrio said she came to terms with the fact that the movie wasn?t going to be exactly like the book and said, “Movies are not real and in theend the scenes work.”

One thing that Donofrio said she was satisfied with was the casting of Drew Barrymore to play her.

She said that Barrymore was a great choice because she was like her in the sense that she was lovable, cute, resilient, and had also gone through rebellious times in her life.

In fact Donofrio said that during one scene Barrymore was crying because it reminded her so much of her own past.

When asked, “Is writing therapeutic?” Donofrio answered, “Yes! Writing is incredibly therapeutic.”

This may be of interest to people who are struggling through hard times and influence them to pick up a pen and pencil and write about it.

Donofrio said her advice to people who have lived the not so perfect life is, “Every time you fall down, it?s a sign that something great is going to happen so don?t give up because it only gets better.”