Sometimes author interviews are cut and dried. A tired author shows up, kind but also fatigued media escort in tow, and provides 15 minutes of answers to prepared questions. There’s nothing precisely wrong with this scenario, but it doesn’t necessarily make for an inspired back and forth.
Other times, author interviews are a more organic kind of thing. Two weeks ago I was privileged to enjoy two of these laid-back meetings, and today I’m going to share the results of one of them…
Justine van der Leun’s debut as an author, “Marcus of Umbria: What an Italian Dog Taught an American Girl About Love,” is a recentl release from Rodale Books. Its darling cover led me to believe that the book might be a cute, light paean to a beloved pet, nothing more.
Fortunately, I’ve been around books and publishing long enough to know better than to judge a book by its cover. Just a few pages in to “Marcus of Umbria,” I knew I was reading something much better than a cutesy animal tale. I also knew that I wanted to meet the author.
Since my friend and colleague Bill Thompson of Eye on Books was also planning to chat with Justine, the three of us arranged to meet at my local Le Pain Quotidien. We wound up having such a great conversation that we shut down the lunch crowd, and I became so happily overcaffeinated that I didn’t sleep that night…but that’s another story.
Justine’s story can be summed up quickly: Girl hates NY media job, girl takes trip to Italy and see handsome stud, girl returns to Italy to live with handsome stud, handsome stud turns out to be a drip, girl gets dog, girl learns true meaning of love and independence, girl returns to NY but eschews real job for life as a writer.
Again, that could sound mighty superficial — but Justine doesn’t stay on the surface. Her Italian fidanzato (“Everyone is a fidanzato or fidanzata in Italy,” she told me. “No one is actually engaged; it’s just a catchall term for ‘They’re together’”) Emmanuele, moves her in with his family, and Justine learns what it means to both belong to a larger one (she was largely raised as an only child of a single mother) while being a complete outsider.
I told Justine I thought her book was less the story of a dog and its owner than it was a study of modern Italian family life. “You’re right,” she said. “When Emmanuele and I broke up, Marcus became my sort of ‘way in’ to continuing to participate in Italian family life.”
It’s evident that Justine truly integrated into her Italian family of choice; she’s so comfortable with their favorite phrases, their rituals, and their way of welcoming people into their lives yet allowing those same people to move on while maintaining the status quo. One character is constantly using the interjection “Eh….beh…” which can be loosely translated as “What are you gonna do? Life goes on…”
From her sojourn in a different country, Justine van der Leun learned that her own life would go on even after it had been entirely changed. “Marcus of Umbria” is a profound look at changing, the kind of memoir that restores your faith in that genre.
