Diary from a darkened room
If screenwriter and director Lorenzo DeStefano has his way, one of America’s oddest literary stories will soon appear on the big screen, with all its Harvard connections intact. “Hypergraphia,” a film project that has already signed Oscar nominee John Hurt for the lead role, tells the story of Boston recluse Arthur Crew Inman (1895-1963), whose 17 million-word diary is, one can safely assume, among the longest ever written. (By comparison, the diary of Samuel Pepys is a scanty 1.25 million words.) The title is the formal name for the overwhelming urge to write — on walls, napkins, and skin if no other means of expression are available. It’s sometimes associated with temporal lobe epilepsy or bipolar disorder, though not in Inman’s case. “He was a classic neurotic” and a strong hypochondriac, said neurologist Alice W. Flaherty ’85, M.D. ’94, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School who has chronicled her own bouts of...