It probably grew out of my frequent crossing of Ponte Garibaldi in Rome, the bridge that takes me from Trastevere and leads to the Jewish Ghetto on the other side of the Tiber, where there is a library, housed in the Centro Studi Americani, that I love to work in. I discovered it when I was living in Rome, and I began writing this piece of fiction there.
The story is adapted from your new novel, “Whereabouts,” which will be published in April. You’ve been writing in Italian for several years now, and you wrote the novel in Italian, under the title “Dove mi trovo,” and then translated it into English. In an excerpt we ran in 2015 from your essay collection “In Other Words,” you describe the moment when you found yourself first writing a diary entry in Italian: “I write in a terrible, embarrassing Italian, full of mistakes. . . . It’s as if I were writing with my left hand, my weak hand, the one I’m not supposed to write with.” Could you have imagined then that you would ever be comfortable enough in the language to write a novel?
When I was taking my first steps in Italian, all I wanted to do was learn to walk, as it were. I wasn’t thinking of a future objective, because the effort of trying to walk was so overwhelming. Then, once I was walking, I had the urge to skip, to go faster, to confront more challenging terrain. It really has been like any other learning process: raising the bar, step by step, and always trying to get a little better, a little stronger. I am certainly more comfortable in Italian now, but the point is to tolerate and work alongside a certain degree of permanent discomfort. The real difference I notice between now and then has less to do with the length or scope of a project and more to do with the syntax itself. “Whereabouts” is constructed as a novel in brief chapters, and the language is pared down and direct, whereas the collection of short stories I’ve just completed in Italian, “Racconti romani,” which will be called “Roman Stories” in English, contains stories—the majority of which were written after “Dove mi trovo”—in which the sentences are elaborated in a different way.
Would you have been able to enter into the life of your protagonist, the woman on the bridge, if you’d written this in English? Does the use of Italian change the way you understand her?
I doubt very much that I would have written “Whereabouts” in English. It belongs to another part of me, one that I have only recently unearthed and begun to cultivate. The Italian writer in me is connected to the English writer, and grows out of the English writer, no doubt, but they are two separate rooms in the same house. The reason I was motivated to keep writing in Italian was to further develop the new voice I discovered in the new Italian room. When I first began to create the protagonist, I didn’t know who she was or where she was from. Honestly, I still don’t know exactly where she is from. It was only at a much later stage that I recognized that she was an Italian-based character. I suppose the fact of creating her voice in Italian enabled me, in the end, to describe her as such, though her identity remains rather vague for much of the book. The only thing that really renders her Italian is her relationship to the language, and the fact that, at one point, I mention that she gives Italian language lessons to a foreign couple. But, again, she herself could be someone of foreign extraction but raised in Italy, as so many people are.
The woman pursues a solitary life in some ways—she has no children, she’s never been married, and we often see her by herself in the city. Yet, at the same time, her daily routine is marked by interactions with friends, with lovers, with neighbors and shopkeepers. Do you think of her as a solitary creature or a social one?
She is very much both things. Her solitude is never a fixed state. It fluctuates, it waxes and wanes, it antagonizes and protects in turn. In some sense she is more “out and about” because of it. Like most of us, at times she dreads being alone, and at times she dreads the company of others. Whether we live with people or not, have children or not, I think we are all searching for an equilibrium between loneliness and companionship, one that needs to be calibrated and recalibrated not only from day to day but throughout life, as circumstances change. In the case of “Whereabouts,” I wanted to follow the days of a female character, more or less my age, who lived in a city alone, and who was sustained by her surroundings as much as by the various people in her life.
She’s in tune with the rhythms and seasons of her city. How important is her hometown to her? Is there something particularly Italian about this sense of place?
She knows her city better than she knows anything else; at one point she recognizes that she knows it to a fault. I started writing the episodes in 2015, when I was living in Rome but knew that I would be returning to the United States. I wrote most of the book on trips back to Rome over the course of my first three years of teaching at Princeton. Every time I went back to Rome for breaks, or for the summer, the book would grow. But I always had the departure in the back of my mind, the awareness that I was always shuttling back and forth. I think this is what contributes to the oscillation in the book, not only because it keeps moving literally from setting to setting, from inside to outside and back again, but because the woman’s story is characterized by a wavering that is figurative, emotional, metaphysical. When I wrote it, I imagined Rome, but I never specify it, and I also folded in some other settings. I wanted to create an atmosphere that was at once abstract and detailed, particular but porous, ambiguous. There is only one real clue in the Italian that suggests the Roman setting, and that is the reference to the cobblestones, the sampietrini, distinctive to the historic city center. The thing that makes it truly Roman to me is the way the protagonist feels embraced by her immediate community, by people in her neighborhood who are not necessarily close friends but nevertheless create a profound and intimate sense of belonging.
Her relationship with one man, the husband of a friend of hers, unfolds over the course of the story. They keep bumping into each other, and there’s an easy intimacy in their encounters which leads the woman—and the reader—to believe that more may come of this. When you started writing, did you know how significant this man would be? Were you ever surprised by the direction of events?
I began to write the individual episodes as they came and did not know what shape they would take. A bit like the character, who is prone to trailing after people on the streets, I spotted her in passing in my imagination, and I just kept following her around. It took a while for me to see that there was a story, potentially, that could link them. Once I created a time frame, and the passing of the seasons, certain things fell into place. I would have to go back to the notebook containing all the handwritten episodes, in the order I wrote them, in order to trace the evolution of the friend’s husband. But, given that there was some potential—that the fleeting encounters might turn into something more—I needed to keep exploring, and putting the two of them in different situations. One thing that strikes me in terms of the ordering of the episodes is that the very first one that I wrote, which is set on a train, is the last to appear in the book.
In recent years, you’ve been splitting your time between the United States and Italy. Travel has, of course, become much harder during the pandemic. Were you translating the novel during this time? Did it make you feel far away?
I began translating the book into English in the fall of 2019 after spending another full year in Italy, a year that began with the publication and presentation of “Dove mi trovo” the previous fall. I needed to better understand the book I’d written in Italian before attempting to translate it into English, so it helped to talk about it and hear reactions, but mostly I needed the book, in Italian, to grow completely cold. I finished the first draft of “Whereabouts” by the end of 2019, back in Princeton, translating it rather quickly, and I spent another year combing carefully through the revisions, mostly during the pandemic, both in the spring and fall. I’d become so used to going back and forth frequently to Rome. But, now that I can’t, translating out of Italian helps to maintain that vital relationship, especially to the language. It was consoling to be able to reconnect with the book this fall especially, and to remember the freedom and joy of living and walking every day through Rome, and feeling so at home and alive there.
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