When Elinor Lipman published Then She Found Me, her book about a woman in search of her birth mother, she knew it would become a movie. The rights for a screenplay were immediately purchased, and Lipman celebrated with friends.

"As soon as it was a handshake agreement that it would become a movie, I threw a party," she recalls as she sits in the lobby of the Ritz Carlton on the eve of the movie's local premiere at the Cleveland International Film Festival. "I even wore a strapless dress with the fake rhinestones."

Little did she know how long the journey would be. That was 1990, and a screenplay based on the novel would go through various permutations before Lipman would grow exhausted with the process and exercise her own options to get the rights back. But the novel would eventually find its way into the hands of Academy Award-winner Helen Hunt, who made some serious changes to the book in co-writing a new screenplay and deciding to make it her directorial debut.

"My agent got a copy of the screenplay and gave it to me, and I initially thought, "Where are my characters?'" Lipman admits. "But I also felt that Helen had been true to the mother-and-daughter relationship. So I wrote her an e-mail and I got back this fabulous, long, heartfelt fabulous letter. She provided a long explanation about why she might have changed things."

Hunt herself plays April Epner, a New York school teacher who gets a surprise when she realizes her recently deceased mother wasn't really her mother. Her mother is actually an eccentric TV talk show host (Better Midler) who's suddenly decided she wants a part in April's life after all, causing the school teacher to do some soul searching. Those characters correspond to Lipman's book, but the movie introduces two new people.

The first is April's husband, Ben (Matthew Broderick), and the second is Frank (Colin Firth), the man she falls in love with after her marriage dissolves. While Lipman says she finds the mother-and- daughter reunion to be "humanly dramatic," the movie plays up the melodrama in the same way that a Lifetime movie would, with lots of crying and somber exchanges. This is a chick flick and then some.

But now that Then She Found Me has seen the light of day, Lipman's awaiting the transformation of two other novels she's penned that have already been optioned for movies. But this time, she's not hosting a party prematurely.

"I used to throw the party," she says. "But now I'm waiting until principal photography begins."

Opens Friday at the Cedar Lee Theater, 2163 Lee Rd., Cleveland Heights, 440-564-2034, clevelandcinemas.com.