Flavor of Italy podcast - writer reflections

View from Atina, Italy - the setting of Broken Madonna

I had the pleasure of being interviewed this week by Wendy Holloway for the Flavor of Italy podcast about Broken Madonna. It’s a conversation that has stayed with me. I got to talk about my childhood memories of Atina, its wooded hills, stoic women in black, rustic food, the dialect of my parents and apparitions of the Madonna, which I love to do. It's well worth a listen, Wendy has a great series highlighting Italian culture and cuisine.

The reason why I’m still thinking about it, is that Wendy has pointed in her article at the deeper questions that Broken Madonna raises. In her reading of the novel, she has distilled the essence at its heart and helped me to think more about what I bring as a writer and what I want to continue to write about. All writers have their themes, and one of the challenges when going on to develop new work is how to carry your interests forward in a way readers will find fresh and compelling.

Through Broken Madonna I have sought to explore, in an engaging way, what we carry through the generations. How much of this background shapes the course of lives? We may be aware of certain stories, but what lies just beneath the surface of consciousness, in terms of traits, interests and narratives? I find this endlessly fascinating, and it explains my guilty TV pleasures - Long Lost Family and Who Do You Think You Are?

Broken Madonna is fictional, and the beauty of fiction is that you get to write about the things that speak to you, make you want to delve into research, sparking ideas to play around with. I’m interested in relationships, the lives of women, what people choose to believe in life, and the stories we tell ourselves. Overlay that with a family history shaped by migration, war, religion and cultural hybridity (in my case growing up within an Italian family in England), plus an interest in recent social and political history, that’s my writing arena.

As a debut novelist, it’s not until your book is in the hands of readers, that you truly start to understand who you are as a writer. It’s when your writing is mirrored back to you, with comments and questions about characters, settings and motivations, that you have a sense of how it resonates.

In Wendy’s words, Broken Madonna is ‘an accessible yet deeply thoughtful novel, perfect for summer reading – whether you’re on the beach, a terrace in Italy, or curled up at home.’