What was your first job? Did you like or
dislike it? Why?
My first job was as a part-time
cashier when I was still at school. I wasn’t very good at it! I enjoyed earning
a bit of money and gaining some independence, but working with the public was a
challenge. I greatly admire those who work in retail – they put up with so much
on a daily basis.
Do you have a pet peeve? If so what is it?
I’m quite a grumpy person, so have a few pet peeves. One
of my biggest is when people assume that Italy is just a holiday destination
and that I’m living out some kind of escapist fantasy. Don’t get me wrong: this
is my home. I’m passionate about Italian history and culture and I love being
surrounded by it every day. But it’s tough to make a living here – that goes
for Italians, too. And the ordinary business of life goes on no matter where
you are, with all its pain and uncertainty and banal, tiring stuff like getting
ill, dealing with heartbreak, doing paperwork … actually, Italy’s quite big on
paperwork.
Do you spend more time researching or writing?
It would be easy to spend all my time researching and
never get around to writing the damn book. Luckily, I had a brilliant
supervisor at university who taught me that the key is to write as you go. That
works just as well for fiction as it does for non-fiction. So I try to do a bit
of research and a bit of writing every day. The research informs what I write,
and the writing throws up the questions I need to answer.
where you got your inspiration for it?
Escape to Tuscany is a dual-timeline
story with two strong heroines: Stella, a young woman working with the Italian
Resistance in 1944, and Tori, a writer who flees to Florence in 2019 to escape
her controlling husband.
I started writing the book out of spite. It was the second
year of the pandemic, I was struggling to stay afloat, and I got sick of
friends asking for updates on my “Italian adventures”. So I decided to write
the most frivolous, aspirational story I could, all about an aristocratic
heroine arriving in Italy to start an exciting new life. I just wanted to vent
my annoyance and maybe indulge in a little escapism myself. But the further I
got into the story, the darker and more complex it became. The final product isn’t
at all what I set out to write, but I think that first angry impulse was a
great thing. It gave the whole process a rawness and an honesty that made it
different to anything I’d written before.
How much of your book is realistic?
In terms of the historical storyline, I hope it’s all
realistic, or at least believable. I immersed myself in the first-person
accounts of women who acted as couriers for the Resistance in occupied Italy.
Many of them were teenagers when they did such dangerous work. I very much hope
that Stella’s story reflects something of the reality these brave women had to
deal with.
The modern storyline? It’s realistic to an extent. Tori’s
in a painful situation, but she’s also very fortunate: she has enough money to
get as far as Florence and enough good people around her to ensure she’s not
totally lost, even at the toughest moments. As I say, this started out as an escapist
story, and that’s really the escapist element. She gets off fairly lightly with
Italian bureaucracy, too!
I do want to note, though, that the story doesn’t end
with everything neatly resolved and tied up in a bow. Tori’s found her footing at
last: she’s got an exciting project, a new home and a new love. But there’s still
hard work and difficulty ahead. Her situation is precarious, and that’s very
realistic for the path she’s chosen.
What are your ambitions for your writing
career?
I’m too realistic myself to believe that I can make a
career writing fiction. I’ll be more than pleased if my writing earns enough
money and finds enough readers to become a regular part of my daily working
life. I like my freelance work – I’m an editor and translator – so I can
imagine living like that very happily.
Who is your role model? Why?
she’s meant to do in life, and she pursues it with single-minded, unselfconscious
clarity. Good on her.
surprise people.
I cry at Galaxy Quest.
BLURB & LINK:
Only fourteen, Stella Infuriati is the youngest member of her town’s resistance network during World War II. Risking imprisonment and death, she relays messages, supplies, and weapons to partisan groups in the Tuscan Hills. Her parents have no idea, consumed instead by love and fear for their beloved son, Achille, a courier and unofficial mechanic for a communist brigade fighting the fascists.
Then, after 1945, Stella seemingly vanishes from the records, her name and story overshadowed by the tragic death of her brother – until a young writer arrives in Tuscany in the spring of 2019, uncovering long-buried secrets.
Fleeing an emotionally abusive marriage and a lonely life on an isolated estate, Tori McNair has come to Florence, the beautiful city her grandmother, Margaret, taught her to love, to build a new life. As she digs into her family history with the help of Marco, a handsome lawyer, Tori starts to uncover secrets of the past – truths that stretch back decades, to a young woman who risked everything to save her world….
