Meryl Streep will play Enid Lambert in an eight-part Netflix adaptation of Jonathan Franzen's bestselling novel The Corrections, and the author says the project is now within reach of the screen at last.

Franzen, who is writing the scripts, told the Guardian he is a month away from finishing them. Once Streep committed to the role of the novel's matriarch — a woman clinging to dreams of hosting a perfect last family Christmas while her husband Alfred declines with Parkinson's and dementia, and their grownup children's lives fall apart in terrible, comical ways — Franzen felt the "chances of making this show have gone up above 50%".

The Netflix deal follows a bruising history of failed adaptations. When HBO dropped its plan to adapt the novel in 2012, Franzen says he was so relieved that he performed his first and last cartwheel on the lawn of his home in Santa Cruz, California.

That HBO project had already survived one earlier casualty: an attempted film adaptation, whose failure did not surprise the author. He had warned that it was impossible to condense his densely plotted doorstopper of a novel into a feature-length film.

For the television version, Franzen signed on as co-writer alongside filmmaker Noah Baumbach. He says HBO was "excluded from the development process. Mistake, because we didn't know how to do TV." Franzen had not even owned a television until a few years earlier, and he had no cable, so as he wrestled with the script he began renting box sets to learn the form. Around three episodes into one drama series, he realised "we have no idea what we're doing. This is not how you do TV. This is bad," he recalls. The result, he says, was "one of the worst pilots anyone has ever made".

The failure marked a turn in Franzen's relationship with the medium. He once considered TV the "enemy" of the serious novelist. In a well-known 1996 essay for Harper's Magazine on the decline of high literature, he complained bitterly about the "banal ascendancy of television". After the HBO series collapsed, he watched Breaking Bad, Nurse Jackie and Silicon Valley — and loved them. In the age of social media, AI and the endless scroll, he now says television has started to look like a "friend".

Franzen also reflected on his own temperament, which he once directed at the culture around him. "It's still mysterious to me that I was angry for so long," he said, speaking ahead of the new adaptation. He described the process of creating new work as "horrible", even as the Netflix series nears completion.

The reversal is striking. The novelist who in 1996 lamented television's rise is now a month from finishing scripts for a streaming series headlined by Streep, having spent the intervening decades watching prestige drama and revising his verdict on the form.

Whether the Netflix adaptation finally breaks the novel's screen curse — something neither the aborted film nor the HBO pilot managed — may now depend on the remaining weeks of writing and the production that follows.