To make it short - the movie has nearly no similarities with the shortstory.
In Twenty Minutes Jane Vare has a terrible incident, where her horse bucks and she flies over her horse and her horse finally landing hard into her lap - smashing her lower body. Still concious but unable to move she remembers episodes from her live like her honeymoon, her divorce and her love-affairs while getting weaker and weaker and fighting for life.
It's wonderfully written and sad, funny and wondeful melancholic at the same time. IMHO they could turned this into a great episodic movie with Winona's character at the center of all of them. And even if Jane Vare dies in the story I think you could have changed this to an open end. I think they could've even brought Lukas Haas in - I liked the country fair scenes quite much - as last episode and then let him find her, rush her to the hospital and then credits.
The story had no boys school, no dead sports guy and how they got into Boys is a complete miracle...
That sounds a gazillion times better!