A good story can be told across generations and in nearly any context. It can be whispered to eye-rubbing children before they give into sleep. It can be laughed about in the back row of a classroom. It can be talked about on road trips and debated in lecture halls. And as writers, we’re always looking for the background context; the point of connection. Saoirse Ronan, who plays Jo in this new film, said it best: “Louisa wrote about a world that we can all relate to.”

For Little Women, the point of connection isn’t challenging to locate. Like stepping in the dark and tripping over a stair you swore was further off. Louisa May Alcott was a master at her craft and in her most iconic book, she told the story of her own family. It’s a version of them, certainly. And while there are differences between the fictional Marches and the very real Alcotts, their pulses would beat together in the heart of Louisa as she sat at her desk and scribbled it out. By hand. In about 3 months.

As the new film releases, I thought I’d take a minute and make sure that you appreciate its brilliance by getting some context before you walk into that movie theater. I had the chance to see it a few weeks back with my fellow Orchard House staffers, and I deeply want you to know what is UP.

Let’s start with the start: we all know Little Women. Maybe you had to read it one summer for school or you love the film version from the 90’s that came out when many of us were children ourselves. Or maybe you’re someone who loves the Marches from one of the other five film adaptations. Yes. There are now 7 major motion pictures of this story.

The first mistake you’ll make walking into that theater is having in your mind the story (not the story behind the story) as someone other than Louisa has told it. You’ll want the actresses to be the same as the actresses before. You’ll keep in mind the soundtrack or a favorite scene and ready yourself for comparison. I can tell you that, in words often attributed to everyone from C.S. Lewis to FDR, “Comparison is the thief of Joy.” Forget the other “versions” and consider the actual story behind the story.

This movie isn’t being made based on the template of other films. It’s being made by a director that deeply loves Little Women and Louisa May Alcott. Greta Gerwig intimately poured over letters and notes and took from that the story behind the story. This film is her attempt to capture who they were both in book and in reality. So here’s some background about the four Alcott sisters and their characters, the March women.

I’m starting with Anna Alcott because she’s the oldest and is often overlooked. In the book, she is Meg. Anna was an aspiring actress who was in a play performed in Concord, Massachusetts when she met John Pratt. It was called “The Loan of a Lover” and they played romantic interests on stage, and it crossed over into real life when they fell in for each other. Their love was simple and sweet and they were married in the parlor of Orchard House with zero days notice. They had two sons named Freddy and Johnny and lived out their years until John passed away and Anna was left with her sons. More on that later.

Next, we have Louisa. She was the writer of the book, and cast herself as Jo—also a writer. Louisa was stalwart and brave. She was a nurse in the civil war for the union army where she contracted Typhoid Pneumonia. Her treatment included mercury-based medication that aged her and depleted her health tremendously. She came back home to Orchard House and did her best to recover but never was the physically well woman she’d been in her youth. She used to walk over 20 miles to Boston to take in a show and then walk back the next day. Now, confined to a bed, she would watch out her bedroom window for her favorite sight: a family of owls who lived in the trees.

May Alcott, Amy in the book, was an artist. And as she watched Louisa struggle, she painted an owl on her mantle above the fireplace so Louisa would always have an owl there with her. May was naturally gifted in art and it can be seen all over the walls in her childhood room. Her parents, Bronson and Abigail Alcott (Mr. March and Marmee), allowed her to literally draw on the walls “as long as she continued to improve.” She once even did a cast of her foot as she was learning to play with different mediums, which you catch in the background of a scene in the film. As Louisa found success in writing and pulled the family out of poverty, she used her wealth to send May to Europe and deeply invested in her art lessons. Their sisterhood was one of great affection and friendly competition. In fact, when May’s art was selected for the Paris Salon (a major honor,) she wrote to Louisa, “Ha Ha!, sister, this is the first feather plucked from your cap!”

And then, we have dear Elisabeth. She was the most close to her character, Beth, in Little Women. Quiet, sweet and very shy, Elisabeth was the sister so many of us ache to remember. She was a musician and her melodeon still sits in the dining room of the Orchard House with her portrait. They called her the “angel of the house” because she never survived to live there. Elisabeth got scarlet fever which weakened her tremendously and she died two years later at only 22. Her death shaped Louisa and she didn’t write about it until Little Women, 10 years later.

These four women, now immortalized as Meg, Jo, Amy and Beth, were actual people. They were raised on a steady diet of unorthodox parenting that fostered their love for each of their callings. Bronson even built Louisa’s desk in an act of cultural rebellion. It was considered bad for women’s health to do “brain work” and a desk was certainly unnecessary, if not considered dangerous. But Bronson, an educational reformer and transcendentalist lecturer, saw that his daughter had a brilliant mind and he freakin’ leaned IN to that.

When I walk through the Orchard House, I see it dressed up in beautiful carpet and fine china and a soapstone sink Louisa bought her mother with winnings from her writing, remembering that it was a dilapidated, fixer-upper sort of place when they moved in. The Orchard House is a place transformed over time as Louisa found her success and that juxtaposition is everywhere.

I see the painting of an owl—one sister’s encouragement to another as she fought for her life and went on to write Little Women in that very room. I see the scribbled art of a child beside her internationally acclaimed paintings created after someone said to her, I believe this is what you were made to do. Go do it. I see the melodeon in the corner, reminding me of the way our dearly loved ones who go too soon leave us to try and make sense of their passing.

Louisa taught herself to write with both hands so she could work on her authoring up to 14 hours at a time (which you’ll see Jo do in the film as a nod to Louisa.) She made more money than Mark Twain and when a publisher who had once refused to pay her more than a sliver of what they paid men asked for the honor of publishing her (once she was famous,) she turned them down because they were still not compensating women fairly. She once said she preferred to “paddle her own canoe” in regard to finding love. She forged her own path completely uphill through nearly every possible barrier and then turned around and used her success to provide for her family. And when Anna’s husband John died, Louisa wrote “Little Men” to make enough to keep them out of worry financially.

When May found love in Europe and gave birth, she named her daughter Louisa May, or LuLu for short. And when May died just weeks after giving birth, they sent the child to live with Louisa who raised LuLu as her own.

When you walk into the theater on December 25, I need you to know that these stories are not just actors telling about random fictional characters. No, they are portraying the story behind the story. One of four firey sisters who lived in poverty and moved over 25 times before landing at Orchard House. Sisters who fought and interrupted and put on plays in the dining room while the audience sat in the Parlor. The real Alcott family that fought for goodness and abolition and calling and using your gifts.

And years later, when Louisa sat her tired and determined self down, she wrote it how she wanted it. In a perfect world, she never would have been so sick and would be full of vigor once again. And in this world, Beth would survive long enough to see Meg get married. All of them would live under one roof, growing up in joy and drama and passion and no one telling them they are only women and therefore they are meant to be fenced in.

We are meant to see in this story that all of us carry the God-ordained gift of the ordinary. That we, too have important stories to tell and what matters is that we cheer one another on to tell them well and truthfully.

Now, 150 years later, the book has never been out of print. Louisa retained her copyright and adopted her nephew so the money from it could still benefit generations of her family to come. The Orchard House sits, stoic and brave in Concord, full of visitors who want to see the house where it happened.

Amy’s boldness and Beth’s sweetness and Meg’s loveliness and Jo’s tenacity remind us of May’s gumption and Elisabeth’s tenderness and Anna’s heart and Louisa’s ability to survive insurmountable odds and then fight to get well enough to sit down at the desk her father built her and write one of the greatest stories literature has ever known.