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What happens when a deeply personal memoir about loss transforms into a Hollywood comedy-drama with Kevin Hart? "Two Kisses for Maddy: A Memoir of Love and Loss" and "Fatherhood" tell the same heartbreaking story from radically different angles, revealing how adaptation can both honor and re imagine true experiences.

Matthew Logelin's raw memoir chronicles the devastating loss of his wife Liz to a pulmonary embolism just 27 hours after giving birth to their daughter. Left suddenly as a grieving single father, Matt documents his journey through that first impossible year with baby Maddy, building a foundation to help others in similar situations. His unfiltered voice—sometimes criticized as pretentious or problematic—nonetheless captures the unvarnished reality of unexpected loss and parenthood.

When Kevin Hart stepped into the role for the film adaptation, he brought deliberate purpose beyond storytelling. Hart specifically chose this project to showcase positive Black fatherhood on screen while bringing awareness to the disproportionately high maternal mortality rates among Black women—the very condition that claimed Liz Logelin's life nearly took Serena Williams' as well. The film expands beyond the book's timeline, creating fictional elements like school uniform battles and relationship struggles that weren't part of Matt's actual experience.

Whether you connect more with the memoir's unflinching grief or the film's hopeful re imagining, both versions ultimately celebrate the same truth: that love transcends loss, and that parenthood requires courage in the face of the unimaginable. Which raises the podcast's central question—is the book really better than the movie when they're telling fundamentally different stories for different purposes?

All episodes of the podcast can be found on our website: https://booksvsmovies.buzzsprout.com/share

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