Creativity unleashed

SCITUATE -- It was 5 in the morning in Duxbury, during her daughter's swim practice, when Claire Cook got the idea. For months, she'd been shuttling Garet back and forth to the pool before dawn. The small talk with other bleary-eyed swim moms was getting old. So one winter day, Cook grabbed some pens and legal pads and sat in her red minivan, scribbling away. Within six months, she had a rough draft of her first novel, ''Ready to Fall."

That was the easy part. Finding a literary agent was tougher. ''I didn't have a clue. I didn't have a connection," says Cook. For the previous 15 years, she had melted into the world of kids and teaching, putting aside her childhood dream of writing. When she finally sent a query letter to a prominent New York agent, she received this reply: ''Dear Claire, If your novel is half as funny as your cover letter, you will definitely find an agent. However, it won't be me."

Today, Cook, 50, is having the last laugh. Her third book, ''Must Love Dogs," has been made into a feature film starring John Cusack, Diane Lane, and Christopher Plummer. The movie premieres in Los Angeles tonight and opens around the country next Friday

Cook; her husband, Jake; Garet, 21; and son Kaden, 18, are flying to LA, where a limo will meet them and take them to the red carpet. They flew out last fall, too, for the ''table read," or the first time the cast reads the script together. Cook went alone during the shooting, which took place in California. In her living room is a green director's chair with her name on it, signed by the cast (Dermot Mulroney penned ''Write on!" while Lane settled for a smiley face beside her name).

As she speaks, Cook is sitting in the sunny kitchen of the white Victorian she and her husband bought years ago in derelict shape and fixed up. In the entryway of her house are two huge posters. One is a promotion for a reading she did for her first book, which came out in May 2000. ''It cost me more to get this framed than I made from that book," she grouses. Then there's the poster for the movie, ''Must Love Dogs," which renders any framing costs moot. Cook will only say that she sold the movie option for ''well into the six figures." She calls the sum ''life-changing" and says it is 16 times what she made as a physical-fitness teacher in the local Montessori school. Scrawled on the poster is a message: ''Dear Claire, I hope we did justice to your wonderful novel! Love, Gary."

That would be Gary David Goldberg, who saw ''Must Love Dogs" in a Vermont bookstore three years ago, and bought it while his own five dogs waited in the car. He optioned the book, wrote the script, directed, and produced the film. Goldberg is known mostly for his TV work; he created ''Family Ties" and ''Spin City," and wrote for many other shows, including ''Lou Grant." He is, of course, Cook's personal hero. ''I mean, I would be happy for a bad movie," she says. ''I would be ecstatic for a bad movie. But this is a good movie. It's funny. It's intelligent. There are characters of all ages." Cusack and Lane play 40-ish singles looking for love through Internet personals.

The book is centered around a large Irish family who live in the town of ''Marshbury" on Boston's South Shore -- she says it's a cross between Marshfield and Duxbury. Much of it is derivative of Cook's own life, with lots of siblings, a playboy of a widowed father, and, of course, dogs. Cook's current dog, Daisy Mei, is a 5-year-old Shar-Pei/Lab mix from the pound (''The Shar-Pei part is high maintenance," she says).

Cook grew up in Scituate, the second oldest of five children; her mother was a college professor, her father managed a credit union. ''He was charming, she was brilliant," is the way Cook describes them. One day when Cook was 10, she went off to school, kissed goodbye at the door by her mother, who was healthy. When she came home that afternoon, her mother was in a coma. She died the next morning of sepsis, the same disease that killed ''Muppets" creator Jim Henson. Cook's father remarried a younger woman, and the couple had three more children for a total of eight -- just like the family in ''Must Love Dogs."

The book is a valentine to those large families of yesteryear, the kind in which no one moves very far away, and everyone minds everyone else's business. The script differs in many ways from the book, not that Cook cares. ''I wouldn't care if he used cats instead of dogs," she says. ''I think the characters and the dialogue very much come from the book, and then Gary just had fun with it. He came up with scenes I wish I'd thought of."

The road from swim mom to successful novelist was fairly short. Cook published her first book at age 45; five years later, she has three to her name and a fourth draft finished. Cook finally sold her first book, about a swim mom trying to get a life, sans agent, to a small publishing house. ''I sent 50 pages and a woman called me and told me everything that was wrong with it. And then they bought it." She laughs. ''I mean, 'bought' is an exaggeration. I believe my advance was $1,000."

''Ready to Fall" got Cook's name in circulation; all of a sudden, agents were seeking her out. She got a big-name agent, who sent her second book, ''Must Love Dogs," to several publishers. Viking offered her a two-book deal for what she again calls ''a life-changing sum of money." Her third book, ''Multiple Choice," has been optioned by the British film company that did ''Notting Hill," ''Fargo," and ''Four Weddings and a Funeral."

''I mean, it was just mind-blowing," says Cook. ''I was a teacher, and Jake is a land surveyor. We had this really laid-back lifestyle." They also had a mortgage and college bills for their daughter, who will be a senior at Emory University in Atlanta. ''We didn't have any money. Our daughter got financial aid." Cook laughs at what the book-and-movie windfall has brought them. ''Instead of paying $12,000 a year at Emory, we pay $46,000."

But really, daily life in her household hasn't changed that much. The only large purchase she has made is a fax machine. Her husband, who is 60, is still a land surveyor in Cohasset. She still sits at her computer -- the legal pads are long gone -- and writes. If they buy a new house, she says, it will be smaller: the couple will be empty-nesters in the fall, when her son leaves for college.

''We have the same life but we get to do some fun things," she says. She's going to a writers conference in Denmark, was invited to be on a panel at the Tribeca Film Festival, and is even going to Ketchikan, Alaska, to speak at a library.

Cook still appears wide-eyed that such success has come to her, a preschool gym teacher in a small town. She majored in film and creative writing at Syracuse University and hoped for a writing career. After graduation, she spent time writing ads for a shoe company, cranking out ''this horrible stuff about men's slippers." Then she took a job at a Plymouth radio station, doing ''everything no one else wanted to do." During the fitness craze in the early 1980s, she began taking aerobic dancing. When her teacher left, Cook took over the class. Before she knew it, she was teaching classes in five towns on the South Shore.

When her babies came along, her career path followed their lives: she taught prenatal and postpartum classes, then fitness and dance at the local Montessori school. She stayed 16 years, until her son finished the eighth grade. Meanwhile, during her daughter's swim practices, she carved out time to write. ''I hid from writing for so many years," she says. ''I think I'm the poster child for finding the muse at mid-life."

She's also the poster child for self-promotion, but it's more amusing than annoying. She has her own website (www.clairecook.com), her own blog, and sends out periodic e-newsletters to friends, family, and readers. She includes pictures from local readings and her own breathless updates on what she calls ''this crazy, midlife ride." A recent missive includes a tidbit on what she is wearing to the LA premiere: she has two dresses ''in case one morphs into something ugly on the plane ride." She offers a link for a contest to win tickets to the premiere, and suggests various tongue-in-cheek ways fans can help push her book, including downloading a ''Must Love Dogs" screensaver on ''all your co-workers' computers."

For the national premiere, Cook is staying in Scituate, where she will attend a reception at the Front Street Bookshop. Then she and readers, wrapped in pink boas -- a prominent prop in the book -- will parade down to the local theater for a screening.

If all this Hollywood stuff ever goes to her head, she always has her kids to bring her back down to earth. Her daughter recently told her: ''Mom, I think you're pretty good, but you should use more compound sentences." Added her son: ''I liked the book, but it's not my genre." So much for Hollywood.