Read This: Marcus of Umbria

I met up with Justine van der Leun at a café just a few hours before she jumped a train to D.C. to do some interviews for her memoir, Marcus of Umbria—the story of how she threw caution to the wind and moved to Italy for a man she’d just met, and ended up falling in love with a dog. She’d been doing a lot of press recently, including some local news spots, although Marcus wasn’t always involved. “She would prefer not to,” van der Leun explained. (Oh, yes, Marcus is a female dog, said discovery not taking place until shortly after the first-impression name had been given.) “She’s very camera-shy, she would much rather stay at home.”

Since van der Leun didn’t just move to Italy for the guy—she also had a ghostwriting gig lined up—she didn’t go with a story in mind, certainly not a memoir. “I wish I had thought of it earlier,” she confessed. “I would have kept better notes and taken better photos.” She had a background as a magazine writer, but “when you write for magazines, you have to write for the voice of the magazine;” finding her own voice was much harder at first—and even before that, there was the proposal to write. “Proposals are an impossible thing to do… You have to be much better at selling… making a clear picture for the editor.”

I don’t know about the proposal, which I haven’t seen, but I’d say she’s done just fine at finding her voice; it’s a wonderful story about impulsively immersing yourself into a totally strange world, finding out that you’re in over your head, and latching on to a source of joy (and frustration) that comes out of nowhere. And whatever she says, the photos are pretty good, too.

13 July 2010 | interviews, read this |

Maggie Pouncey’s Perfect Reader at Greenlight Bookstore

I’ll be at Greenlight Bookstore tonight for another installment of our monthly “Author/Blogger” series. This time around, it’s a hyperlocal affair, as Robin Lester of Clinton Hill Blog interviews Brooklyn-based Maggie Pouncey, who will be reading from her debut novel, Perfect Reader. As always, we’ll also be fielding questions from the audience—and since it looks like it actually might not rain this month, I hope those of you reading this in New York City might be able to make it. (The reading starts at 7:30 p.m.; Greenlight is right at the Lafayette St. stop on the C line, and very close to the Atlantic Avenue nexus for several other subways.)

I’m catching up with the back half of Perfect Reader this afternoon; it’s a great story about a twentysomething woman who’s struggling to deal with her father’s death, the situation exacerbated by his designation of her as his literary executor—including a collection of unpublished poems he wrote about his love for a girlfriend she never knew existed—who’s very eager to see those poems published.

12 July 2010 | events |