General

Oriana Fallaci was a bold, provocative journalist on par with Mike Wallace and Barbara Walters. She was a master of the Q&A, so here is my Q&A—with myself.

Q: Why did you write a novel about Oriana Fallaci?

A:  She was confident, defiant, brave, brilliant, glamorous—basically all the things I want to be. She made an important contribution to journalism—she revolutionized the art of the interview—and I wanted to tell that story.

 

Q: Who was Oriana Fallaci?

A: A girl who was born poor in Florence, raised during wartime, and forced to drop out of university. Yet she rose to fame as the greatest interview of her time, best reporter in the world, a legend. She was born in 1929, when journalism was all-male, so she was a maverick and trailblazer.

 

Q: Why isn’t Fallaci better known?

A: In Europe, she’s a household name. In America, who knows; we have short memories. She lived in Manhattan for decades and became famous in America in 1973 when she interviewed Henry Kissinger, which he called his worst conversation with any member of the press. She’s an untold story.

 

Q: Was Oriana as bold and kick-ass in her private life as she was in her professional?

A: Nope. She was fragile, sensitive, soft. That’s why I wrote the line Every woman is two women. I find it poignant, that she could reach the pinnacle of her profession yet suffer setbacks in her personal life and remain unfulfilled.

 

Q: Oriana wrote about sexism, reproductive choice, and work/life balance. Has anything changed for women since the 1970s?

A: Somewhat. Slowly. And…no.

 

Q:  Why historical fiction?

A: I love movies and books “based on a true story,” or in other words being entertained while learning. The English call this genre biographical fiction, which is more precise.

 

Q: Oriana is also a love story?

A: Yes, a tragic love story, my favorite kind. Aristotle wrote about our attraction to “tragic pleasure.” I thought I was the only weird one who enjoys that kind of sadness.

 

Q: The novel is described as sexy—why?

A: Older woman/younger man: Oriana was 44 and Alexander was 34 when they fell in love. He turned her on to the pleasures in life, both physical but also taking a break from her workaholic ways by swimming in the Aegean or dining outdoors under a full moon.

 

Q: Did your Greek background play a role in your interest in this story?

A: Definitely. I learned my own Greek history by researching Oriana and her love affair with Alexander Panagoulis. He was imprisoned and tortured for five years by Greece’s dictatorship of 1967-1974. I didn’t know a thing about the military junta that took over my parents’ birthplace.  Alexander made a huge sacrifice for his country. There’s a statue of him erected in Athens, but during his lifetime he endured many trials and was misunderstood.

 

Q: How did you research Oriana?

A: The most fun was going to Boston University and studying her archives housed there.  Putting on the white gloves and handling original manuscripts, letters, newspaper and magazine articles, even a Christmas card. They have her original interview cassettes, and listening to her smoker’s voice while questioning e.g. Walter Cronkite brought her crashing to life. Of course, I read all her books, and I watched her being interviewed on Dick Cavett and Charlie Rose on YouTube.

 

Q: What are some of your favorite lines from Oriana the character in the novel?

A: The only thing to do when you’re scared is act. I’m stubborn, I never give in. I’ve had to work twice as hard as a man but I’m glad; it’s made me better.

 

Q: And some of Fallaci’s real-life zingers to world figures?

A: My favorite is “You must be joking,” to a dictator who lied in answer to her question—and there were armed guards in the room! She said to Kissinger, “Unless I’m mistaken, you’re a very cold man, Dr. Kissinger.” She prodded Gaddafi, “You don’t remember? You should” and then said, “I want to understand why everyone dislikes you so much.”  Honestly, the list goes on. Christiane Amanpour has said Fallaci’s interviews should be required reading for all journalists, and I agree.

 

Q: Where did Oriana get her courage?

A: She grew up fighting with her father in the Italian Resistance against Hitler and Mussolini, and it toughened her. At age fourteen, she was forced to surmount her fear while delivering a grenade or carrying secret messages in her braids past German checkpoints. Later, when she had to interview a world figure in the White House or a palace, it didn’t compare to her early risk-taking, and she was not intimidated.

 

Q: Describe your road to publishing.

A: Sisyphus pushing a rock uphill.  It took eleven years, two agents, two freelance editors, carpal tunnel, a new eyeglass prescription, and finally I sold it myself to Delphinium. I am what they call “unagented,” which sounds a bit suspect, doesn’t it?

 

Q: Do you have another novel in the works?

A: Yes, halfway done. But I don’t know if I’ll have time to finish before AI finishes it for me.

 

At age six, there was Bradley with freckles and a voice oddly raspy for his age, the same as mine. A witty boy who laughed a lot; his freckles glowed with humor. We walked to school together holding hands. He grew up to manage a Las Vegas casino and, as rumor had it, dealt drugs on the side. Not suitable at all for the long haul. I can see us hand in hand, walking down East New York Avenue, looking both ways at every corner, finally making it to the schoolyard and running to our respective lines. This was true love. Our romance was brief, but all the years through high school, when we met in the halls, we greeted each other warmly, ripples of memory passing between us.

The next was a girl, Paula. I was nine. It was her name that drew me, exotic, so different from the names of my daily friends, the Barbaras, Carols, Judys and Susans of Brooklyn. Paula came from afar, somewhere upstate, and visited her aunt and uncle across the street during school vacations. Distance, too, was exotic. There was little distance in Brooklyn, the outer or inner sort. I always craved the exotic; my father mocked me when I used the word. Also exotic was Paula’s skin, not black, that wouldn’t have been possible on our block back then, but brown like a Native American or a Mexican although she was neither, most likely descended from Sephardic Jews of the Middle East. I waited eagerly for my mother to announce, Paula’s here. I rushed across the street to ring her bell. I didn’t know then that I was in love.

I picture her sitting on my bed, both of us cross-legged, playing cards or playing with dolls or simply talking about whatever nine-year-olds talk about. After a year or so, she stopped coming. Paula, wherever you are, I missed you so.

Thirteen, a bad year for any girl. We summered in the Catskills, a site of torpor worse even than Brooklyn, and shared a wall and porch with the family next door. The two sons, sixteen and nineteen, worked in the day camp. It was the older boy I mooned over, as girls often fix on the unattainable. He was large and dark (dark like Paula), with black hair in a crew cut, a handsome beefy face, good-natured, unmarred by thought or introspection. He walked around in bathing trunks, making it easy for me to admire his tanned body and hairy legs. For some forgotten reason he called me Tex; I thrilled to the name. One day I sat on my porch in my bathing suit, holding my towel, hoping he would appear. And, miracle, his screen door opened and out he came in his trunks, carrying a towel. Hi, Tex. His voice sliced a path through my innards. I remember the slicing feeling to this day. Going to the pool? I nodded. Me too, he said. Walk with me. Indescribable joy, walking down the dirt road with Lenny, hoping ardently that my friends would see us. It was almost like a date. I dreamed that from then on we’d be a couple, like the many transient couples the summer shaped—only coupledom could ease the smothering dullness—those little loves that ended at Labor Day. But when we reached the pool, he joined his friends and I joined mine. I’d been imagining some horseplay in the water, maybe with a ball.

I relived that five-minute walk all through the summer and the deadly fall. Some years later I married a boy, not my preferred dark or brawny. I loved him anyway. I imagined he was taller than he was. We talked on the phone at night for hours, I in my older sister’s bedroom I’d inherited when she left to get married, as every girl had to do. I was amazed to find a boy who could actually talk and who read books. I didn’t realize till later that such boys were plentiful if you had the patience to wait and knew where to look. It was like buying the first house that you see, and sometimes that works out quite well. I love him but as we grow old I wonder how I could have plunged so thoughtlessly, blind-eyed, into the future with a stranger.

I’d been getting my short stories published in little magazines for many years, but friends would invariably ask, “When are you going to write that novel?” as if it was an errand I had simply forgotten, as if it was a suit I needed to pick up at the dry cleaner.  Alice Munro, by the way, was still fielding this question when she received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013!  I mentioned Ms. Munro’s name a lot when this issue came up.  If she could take it, then so could I.  In fact, I had written a novel some years back, a still unpublished one, a family saga set mostly in Iceland.  But even as I was writing it, I considered myself a short story writer attempting a novel, rather than the other way around.  I was probably getting too bogged down in labels, but luckily it didn’t impact my process — if that’s the word for it.  I don’t have the most conventional background for a fiction writer, at least if you look at the author bios in the lit mags where I’ve been published.  Meaning that I don’t have an MFA or teach anywhere and my jobs have never been specifically in the literary field.  However, I had been lucky enough to have signed with an encouraging agent and to possess enough energy and persistence to write at all hours, which quite often means in the middle of the night.  As for the novel vs. short story question, I honestly didn’t set out to write a novel.  Underburn started as a text.  I have close friends in California who tragically lost their home to a wildfire in 2018.  They had moved in with family temporarily.  It was a terribly sad time, but rather heroically they were trying to find some humor in their living situation ― landing with elderly parents who were somewhat challenging and set in their ways.   They told me a couple of funny stories, so I turned one of them into a microfiction piece and sent it to them as a text.  I think they were amused.  Around this same time, I had stumbled upon Nancy Sinatra from 1966, singing her hit, These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ on YouTube with some backup dancers.  I started wondering about those dancers and the lives they have led since that performance (I think about movie extras too!) and how one of them just might have been impacted by a wildfire all these years later.  That gave me Iris, my first character, and got the plot moving.  I was drawn to the idea of the past intruding on all the characters in this story and of having the action take place on both coasts.  Still, as I began writing it, I thought it would end up being a short story . . . and then a long story . . . and then a novella.  Truth be told, the characters just kept speaking to me, as pretentious as that might sound.  I knew it was turning into a novel when I started dreaming about them, when they started debating me in my sleep, and joking around, like we’d known each other forever.  The characters would pop into my head during lockdown Zoom meetings and while I was doing the laundry.  I took a lot of notes.  I’ve written stories that were difficult for me from a technical standpoint or an emotional one, however, Underburn was the most joyful of my writing experiences.  I was so grateful to lose sleep over it.  I still think about the characters, living independently, now that they have moved on without me. I catch myself wondering how they’ve managed during the pandemic, or how they’re making ends meet.  I am absolutely thrilled to see Underburn find a home at Delphinium, and for me to finally publish that novel.  Ultimately, though, it comes back to the work itself, however you choose to categorize it, and the idea of putting something out in the world that hasn’t existed before.