In Popular Culture
The Quinlans published two books about the case: Karen Ann: The Quinlans Tell Their Story (1977) and My Joy, My Sorrow: Karen Ann's Mother Remembers (2005).
A 1977 TV movie, In The Matter of Karen Ann Quinlan was made about the Quinlan case, with Piper Laurie and Brian Keith playing Quinlan's parents.
The eponymous heroine of Douglas Coupland's novel Girlfriend in a Coma is Karen Ann McNeil. She collapses after a party where she has taken Valium as well as some alcohol. Like Karen Ann Quinlan, she also has deliberately stopped eating in order to fit into an outfit (in this case, a bikini). For these reasons (and the frequent nostalgic references to events from the 1970s in Coupland's works) the character is thought to be based loosely on Quinlan. In the novel, Karen awakens after being comatose for nearly eighteen years.
Read more about this topic: Karen Ann Quinlan
Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or culture:
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)