LibraryThing is pleased to sit down this month with bestselling author, screenwriter, producer, director, and podcast host Adriana Trigiani, described by USA Today as “one of the reigning queens of women’s fiction.” The author of twenty-one books, she made her debut in 2000 with Big Stone Gap, the first of a series of four novels set in Trigiani’s own Virginia hometown, which the author adapted and directed as a movie of the same name. Trigiani’s 2009 Very Valentine, the first of a trilogy, was adapted by its author as a Lifetime television film. Her books, including stand-alone bestsellers like Lucia, Lucia (2003) and The Shoemaker’s Wife (2012), have been published in thirty-eight countries. In addition to her novels for adults, Trigiani has published two young adult novels about a teen filmmaker—Viola in Reel Life (2009) and Viola in the Spotlight (2011)—a picture book for younger children—The House of Love (2021)—and a number of works of nonfiction, from Don’t Sing at the Table: Life Lessons from my Grandmothers (2010), a New York Times bestseller, to Cooking With My Sisters (2004). She is host of the podcast, You Are What You Read, and in 2023 she was knighted by President Sergio Mattarella of Italy with the Cavaliere dell’Ordine della Stella d’Italia.

Known to explore her Italian heritage in her work, her latest book, The View from Lake Como, due out from Dutton in early July and currently on offer as a giveaway through Early Reviewers, tells the story of an Italian American woman who travels to her ancestral home in Italy. Trigiani sat down with Abigail to answer some questions about her new book.

Since the release of your debut in 2000, you have produced close to one book per year, many of them bestsellers. Where do you get the ideas for your stories, and how did The View from Lake Como get its start?

My ideas always start with a notion or a story from my family. I’m from a big Italian family, with many branches and many colorful characters. My family is from three regions in Italy—and as you know, every region has its own stories, culture and point of view. The View from Lake Como is a modern retelling of my great grandmother Giuseppina Perin (on my paternal grandmother’s side). Giuseppina was from the Veneto, a proud Venetian. She died very young-of pleurisy at the age of 42. I only knew her through the stories told by my
grandmother and great aunts and uncles—and she always intrigued me. I study the few photographs of her and try to know her. When it came time to write the story, I didn’t want to write it in the past. I had written The Good Left Undone and was so immersed in history for so long, I thought I needed a lighter approach. Also, my great grandmother’s story lent itself to comedy—especially since my dad’s first cousin Monica showed up at a tour stop with my great grandmother’s shoes, hat, and purse—filled with treasures. I was off to the races.

Many have remarked on your exploration of your Italian heritage through the stories you tell. How has this shaped your work? Why is it important for you to explore this theme?

I think the great books, the ones that we remember, the ones that move us, have a feeling of personal resonance—emotion flowing through the words, a keen eye for the experience of the characters through the author’s lens—a specific story that could only be told by you. Or for that matter, me. My heritage is my super-power. The Italian American experience is rich, and yes, I hear the tropes and see the parodies, and all the yakking about the Mob, but the truth is, the Italian American tent is a big one. I wanted the stories of Italian immigration I shared to ring true and to inspire, to paint the America and the Italy through the eyes of my loved ones—and not just my own, your loved ones too. Italy, in a sense, is a feeling. There is a great longing for home. Of course, America is my home, but I find a serenity in Italy that I only experience there. This duality of feeling is worth exploring and writing about. Sometimes the stories involve courage, other times romance, the art of creating, of craftsmanship. I hope all of it has found its way into my novels. Richly told stories of home, set in history or in the moment are always interesting to me. I hope they are for the reader too.

There are two Lake Comos in your new book. Have you visited both of them? Did you have to do any research about either when writing the story, and if so, what was the most interesting thing you learned?

Yes, I think it was important to have spent lots of time in both Lake Como towns. My mother’s people are from the Lombardy region of Italy, north of Bergamo, in the Italian Alps. I set The Shoemaker’s Wife there. Lake Como is a short drive from my mother’s ancestral home. Lake Como is a magnet for me, and I try to get there every time I visit the Alps. I hope if you haven’t had a chance to visit it, you will someday. There is something about it that is soothing, peaceful and mysterious. It’s a place that shores you up. Now, Lake Como, New Jersey is beautiful too—and in that way that is uniquely American. Once called South Belmar, the residents were tired of being a dumping ground between Belmar and Spring Lake, so they changed their name! They became Lake Como, named after the lake in the town. I was so blown away by this research and realized that the story of the town and of the protagonist of the novel—Giuseppina Capodimonte Baratta Bilancia, 33, and living in her parents’ basement—is the same story. What happened to Giuseppina? How would she re-claim her life on her own terms? How could she find happiness and thrive? And how could Lake Como, New Jersey reclaim its glory and reinvent itself?

Has your work as a filmmaker influenced your writing? Do you find that you are a visual storyteller?

The adaptation of a novel is a completely different exercise than writing the book. I began as a playwright, then wrote television and film. The truth is the book helps more when I’m directing than the other way around. I don’t think about film when I’m writing a novel-and why would I? The imagination takes the writer anywhere, I’m not confined by the rules of cinema or a budget. As a novelist, I’m there to please the reader. I can take the reader anywhere, in any time in a good story. And, when the book is done, it can live in other forms and be dramatized—and I love doing it. I love when other artists adapt my work too. But writing a novel and writing a screenplay are separate enterprises, separate creative endeavors. Directing a film is another skill set entirely. But all three bring me enormous challenges and satisfaction—in wholly different ways.

Tell us a little bit about your writing process. Where and how do you write? Do you have a specific goal you set for each day, week or month?

I write seven days a week in a sunny room, when it’s sunny of course! For those who read this and love vacation or working less, I am in awe of you. I’m always thinking about something that has something to do with whatever I’m writing. I don’t know how else to do it. I like the intensity and embrace it. I love a deadline. I like the feeling of being responsible to a calendar. It pushes me forward. The writing process is one thing, you’re alone in the dark, creating a world where there was none, and the rewriting is the wrangling—making the storytelling smooth. The hardest job in the world is to create a simple, effortless read. It helps to have a sense of humor! I appreciate this question and the opportunity to say, I am lucky and blessed to write for a living—and there isn’t a day or an hour that goes by that I am not grateful for the opportunity to do the work I love. The reader has given me this gift, and in honor of her, I use my time wisely. I am also grateful to my editor and publisher. There are so many more books to write!

What’s next for you? Do you have more novels or other books in the works? Do you think you’ll adapt The View from Lake
Como for film or television?

I hope so! I’m working on a new novel and hope to have it finished in time to write and direct The View from Lake Como. I’m excited about the possibilities of this book adapted to the screen.

Tell us about your library. What’s on your own shelves?

My husband is handy, and I thank God for him. He built a library in our old house in Greenwich Village that accommodates close to 2000 books. Throughout the house, you’ll find more books—and we estimate close to 4,000 in total. I have a pretty extensive cookbook collection-including How to Cook a Wolf. Over the years, I have collected books, some signed, a couple of rare ones, a lot of biographies, autobiographies, history, the books my parents loved, the books my grandparents enjoyed, novels, and even children’s books. When I hold a book, it’s a living art form. Within the covers of a book is everything, a world, a point of view, characters that speak to me, and essential knowledge that makes me look the world with new eyes. As one goes on in life—looking at things with new eyes becomes important. There are even times that we need that new point of view in order to survive. I have an extensive coffee table book collection—because sometimes, images the size of postage stamps are not enough. You do realize that someday there will be no postage stamps so that reference will not make any sense to the person who stumbles upon this interview. When I am building a world of characters, I need those images—some I return to time and again. I’m inspired by the great artists—and their world view. There are days when only Mario Buatta, the decorator, or Louise Dahl-Wolfe, the photographer, or Orson Welles, the filmmaker or Cy Twombly the painter, for example, can push me forward. Books are my refuge, but they are also my hope.

What have you been reading lately, and what would you recommend to other readers?

I am lucky to read for the You Are What You Read podcast, and I hope you are enjoying those conversations. Lately, I have been on a non-fiction bender, reading the memoirs of E.A. Hanks, Graydon Carter, Keith McNally and Peter Wolf. There is something in each of these memoirs for everyone—if you’re interested in mother daughter relationships, the heyday of magazines, the story of an unlikely restauranteur or a rock idol in the shark infested waters of the music business, there’s a summer read in there for everybody. The library remains the most exciting place on earth to me, and our librarians, the stewards of knowledge. You are my everything! I don’t think it gets any better than that—and that’s coming from the daughter of a librarian. Thank you all and thank you for inviting me to share these thoughts.

I was pleased to sit down this month with Laura Spinney, the author of Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, a new book about Proto-Indo-European. Spinney is a Paris-based British and French science journalist best known for Pale Rider, a global history of the 1918 influenza, which has been translated into more than 20 languages.

Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global traces the story of Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor of languages spoken by nearly half of humanity, including English, Latin and Irish in western Europe, Sanskrit and Hindi in India, and even the lost Tocharian languages of western China. Starting in its Black-Sea cradle 6,000 years ago, Spinney blends historical linguistics, mythology, archaeology and genetics with travel stories and personal encounters. Kirkus called the result “a smart, dense, detailed account,” while Publishers Weekly concluded that “this rivets.”

As a former student of Latin, Greek and a little Hittite, I was eager to read the book and interview the author. I was excited to find that archaeology and genetics have transformed the field in recent years. We spoke about the DNA revolution, her favorite language and—of course—her books and reading life!

Tim: What made you want to write about Proto-Indo-European?

Laura Spinney: Because it’s a subject that people get passionate and very grumpy about, that matters to them out of all proportion; because getting at the truth requires real detective work, gathering clues in at least three scientific domains; and because the ancient DNA revolution has pretty much rewritten the Indo-European story in the last decade – to the extent that even people working in those three fields will tell you that nobody has an overview. When I heard that, I realised that there was a useful service that I could provide as a journalist, because I could interview people in the three fields and weave a narrative out of what they told me – a sort of state of the union of the Indo-European question, at this moment in history.

Tim: Starting from hundreds or thousands of original speakers, the descendants of Proto-Indo-European now outpace all other language families in numbers and geographic spread. Why?

Laura Spinney: Something was very successful about that particular language family, no doubt about it. But I think a lot of it comes down to historical accident, or accidents. Proto-Indo-European happened to be the language of a group of people who invented a new way of life – nomadic pastoralism – that allowed them to exploit the vast energy reserves of the Eurasian steppe better than anyone had before them. The inevitable result was a population explosion, and as they spread out, those nomads’ descendants carried their languages with them. But Proto-Indo-European itself eventually died out, and so did many of its offspring. About 400 Indo-European languages and dialects are spoken today, and none of them would have been intelligible to the original Proto-Indo-European-speakers, so it’s not as if the family stood still. Its success, if you want to call it that, has been due to (some of) its speakers’ ability to adapt to a changing context.

Tim: After covering the Yamnaya, the likely first speakers, you move onto chapters about the many branches of Proto-Indo-European. What did you most enjoy learning and writing about?

Laura Spinney: I love them all. I would say that, like a good parent. But it’s true that the Tocharian story was one of the ones I took most pleasure in writing, because of the suggestion that the language was seeded by prehistoric people who were on some kind of crusade – looking for their own utopia. People have set off in search of that non-existent paradise throughout history, and now we know they were doing it in prehistory too. The human imagination is a powerful thing.

Tim: The German translation is titled Der Urknall unserer Sprache, “The Big Bang of Our Language.” Maybe that’s because Germans self-centeredly call it “Indo-Germanic.” But is understanding the origin of our language and people also a sort of self discovery?

Laura Spinney: It certainly has been for me. What have I learned? I’ll keep my list to three things. One, that language is unbelievably malleable, and that languages are time capsules that store their own history within them. If we are clever, we can unravel them like old scrolls and discover that history. Two, that there are deep connections between languages spoken very far apart in the world, and between the stories that their speakers tell. This fact seems to me to explain much about us, but it was previously absent from my education. And three, that migration has been a constant throughout human (pre-)history, and that the paths those migrants took are, to a very large extent, preserved in the branchings of our linguistic family trees.

Tim: Tell us about your library.

Laura Spinney: I love to read but unfortunately I’m a slow reader. If I could change one thing about myself, it would be that. I prefer to read physical books, though I’m not dogmatic about it. I live in Paris where apartments are relatively small so there isn’t an enormous amount of space for books and very annoyingly, mine are not organised according to any known system. My solution has been to carve out two emergency areas. One, on the floor, is books relevant to my current project. The other – suitably elevated – is books that have been important to me at various times and that remain close to my heart. They include works by Camus, Kundera, Faulkner, Jeanette Winterson and Italo Calvino. The shelf dedicated to them is always the closest to where I work, so that their good literary vibes can wash over me.

Tim: What have you been reading lately?

Laura Spinney: John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. I loved it. I copied out these lines into my diary: “‘Maybe the knowledge is too great and maybe men are growing too small,’ said Lee. ‘Maybe, kneeling down to atoms, they’re becoming atom-sized in their souls. Maybe a specialist is only a coward, afraid to look out of his little cage. And think what any specialist misses – the whole world over his fence.'”

LibraryThing is pleased to sit down this month with novelist Nancy Kricorian, whose work explores the experiences of the post-genocide Armenian diaspora. Her debut novel, Zabelle, published in 1998, has been translated into seven languages and adapted as a play. Her essays and poems have appeared in journals like The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, Guernica, Parnassus, Minnesota Review, and The Mississippi Review. Kricorian has taught at Barnard, Columbia, Yale, and New York University, as well as with Teachers & Writers Collaborative in the New York City Public Schools, and she has been a mentor with We Are Not Numbers. She has been the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, a Gold Medal from the Writers Union of Armenia, and the Anahid Literary Award. Her newest book, The Burning Heart of the World, follows the story of an Armenian family caught up in the Lebanese Civil War, and was recently published by Red Hen Press. Kricorian sat down with Abigail to answer some questions about her new book.

The Burning Heart of the World was published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Lebanese Civil War and the one hundred and tenth anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, events which are central to the book’s story. How did the idea for linking these events, and the more recent trauma of 9/11 come to you? What insights can be gained from thinking about these terrible episodes of history in relation to one another?

I am interested in the way that mass trauma events inform and shape people’s life trajectories, and in the Armenian case the way that the genocide haunts families across generations. That haunting is often a silent or unspoken one, and all the more powerful for being so. In making these connections visible I hope to open spaces for repair and renewal. Sometimes going back to imagine and give shape to our forebears’ traumas is also a way of building strength to deal with our present ones.

This new book, and your work as a whole addresses the experiences of the Armenian diaspora, of which you are a part. How has your own personal and familial history influenced your storytelling? Are there parts of The Burning Heart of the World that are based upon that history?

My first novel, Zabelle, was a fictionalized account of my grandmother’s life as a genocide survivor and immigrant bride. My next book, All the Light There Was, told the story of someone of my generation growing up in my hometown under the shadow of the unspoken familial and community experience of the Armenian genocide. All the Light There Was, which is set in Paris during World War II, went far beyond the scope of my personal and family history in a way that required extensive research, as did The Burning Heart of the World, but there are small details in both of those novels that are drawn from personal history as well as different elements of my main characters’ temperaments that are similar to mine.

Your story is told from the perspective of a young person living through these events, but chronicles their effect on multiple generations. Is this significant? Are there things that a youthful perspective allows you to do, that a more mature outlook might not?

I have had a long fascination with the bildungsroman, the novel of formation, which in its classical form is the story of the growth and character development of a young man. In college I took a course on the “female bildungsroman” in which we read The Mill on the Floss and Jane Eyre, among other texts, and learned that the novel of development for women traditionally ended in either death or marriage. In all four of my novels, I write from the point of view of girls as they make their way towards adulthood. With Vera in The Burning Heart of the World, I wanted to show the Lebanese Civil War from a young girl’s perspective as she moves through adolescence. I am interested in centering the experience of girls and women in my work, with a particular focus on the way they manage and care for their families in times of great violence.

Did you have to do any research, when writing your book? If so, what were some of the most interesting and/or memorable things you learned?

I want the reader to be immersed from the first page in the time and place I am writing about—to be able to see, smell, and hear the world that the characters inhabit. It takes deep research and knowledge to build that world, and my favorite part of that work is listening to people who lived through the time I’m writing about tell their stories. I collect anecdotes and details in the way that a magpie gathers material to build a nest. So, for The Burning Heart of the World, I read over 80 books, both fiction and non-fiction, and interviewed upwards of 40 people. I also made three trips to Beirut so that I could become familiar with the city and the neighborhood that Vera lived in.

Tell us a little bit about your writing process. Do you have a particular place you prefer to write, a specific way of mapping out your story? Does your work as a teacher influence how you yourself write?

My writing process varies from project to project. For the last two novels, I have sat cross-legged in my favorite armchair with my laptop. Sometimes I make up rules for myself—such as I have to write one page a day, or if I’m busy with other commitments, I tell myself I must write for fifteen minutes a day. If I sit down for fifteen minutes, it will often turn into an hour or two, and if it’s only fifteen minutes, the piece I’m working on will stay in the front of my mind as I’m walking the dog or going to the subway. I have not been teaching formal university classes much in the past ten years but have moved to a one-on-one mentoring model that I enjoy a great deal. The careful attention that I pay to my mentees’ writing has made me more attentive to my own.

What is next for you? Are there other books in the works that you can share with us?

I’m currently working on a series of essays about my family that I think will be a memoir in pieces. I have written one essay about my relationship to the Armenian language and my grandmother that’s called Language Lessons, and one about my father’s relationship to motor vehicles called His Driving Life. Next up is a piece about my Uncle Leo, who was an amazing character—as a teenager he was the Junior Yo-Yo Champion of New England and for many decades was a guitar player in an Irish wedding band, the only Armenian in the band but quite a rock star in Boston’s Irish community.

Tell us about your library. What’s on your own shelves?

In my study, I have shelves filled with books about Armenian history, culture, and literature. I particularly love and collect books of Armenian folk tales and proverbs. In the bedroom, we have all our novels, memoirs, and literary biographies. There is one shelf devoted to Marcel Proust, and another to Virginia Woolf. Poetry collections, photo and art books, and books about the history of New York City are in the living room.

What have you been reading lately, and what would you recommend to other readers?

I recently read and loved a collection of Etel Adnan’s essays entitled Voyage, War, Exile. I’m currently reading my friend Patricia Kaishian’s new book Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature, which blends nature writing with memoir. And for poetry, I recommend Mosab Abu Toha’s beautiful and devastating collection Forest of Noise.