Sara Bareilles has been announced as working on a new musical, teaming up with Pulitzer finalist playwright Sarah Ruhl to adapt Meg Wolitzer’s 2013 bestseller ‘The Interestings’.

The book is about six teenagers who meet at summer camp in the 1970s and form a lifelong bond over dreams of leading creative, inspiring lives. Decades later, all six are living in New York City, navigating their professional and personal lives as they grow together and apart.

The press release says Sara was inspired to start writing the musical’s songs before even finishing the book. “To borrow a quote from one of our main characters: I have fallen in love… with a group of people. Meg Wolitzer’s extraordinary creation, ‘The Interestings’, was such an immediate and fascinating world of humanity and ache and adolescence and regret. I found so many moments that felt like singing. Making this musical has been a conjuring, a deep listening to the themes of the beautiful novel and a tremendously energising creative conversation with the wild wisdom and endless talent of Sarah Ruhl as my collaborator, bringing these new friends to life in a new way. I am so thrilled to be a part of this wonderful team.”

Book writer, Sarah Ruhl, said: “I am so thrilled to be adapting this novel, a hymn to yearning and being alive, with the goddess-like fount of creativity, Sara Bareilles. Meg’s brilliant book speaks to some of the biggest questions: how do we become? How do we know when our lives are of value, how do we know when we have ‘enough?’ How do complicated friendships endure? The setting of an arts camp is familiar to me as a besotted former camper and sings with nostalgia. I can’t wait to share this tale of youth and growth with an audience.”

Author Meg Wolitzer added: “Sara Bareilles and Sarah Ruhl are both brilliant, expansive, electrifying artists whose work I respond to so deeply. My novel is populated by a group of characters I still think about and truly miss, and the music they listen to and play when they’re young resonates in the book, so the idea of a musical adaptation is thrilling. To see and hear Sara’s and Sarah’s interpretation of my novel onstage will be an absolute joy, a novelist’s dream.”