Years ago, one of the big publishing houses was bringing out titles that brought little attention when they came out. I remember discovering Weeds and savoring every bit of hardship a family endured on a Kentucky farm in the early twenties.

A friend of mine recommended another novel, Burning Marguerite. The novel published 2003 and never really took off.This from the book’s back cover: One winter morning James Hack Wright finds nine-four-year-old Marguerite Deo–the woman he has always known as “Tante”–lying dead in the woods outside his cabin, clad only in a flowered nightgown.

The book turns back and forth from the discovery of Marguerite’s body by the man she raised, to her own life, to the sheriff who is suspicious about her death, all couched in a quiet sense of loving.

Burning Marguerite is a wonder and should be read.

I speak Italian. I also fancy myself a writer. Imagine when a friend of mine handed me the memoir In Other Words, written in both English and Italian, and said I should read it.

Part memoir, part a romance with language, author Jhumpa Lahiri takes us on an odyssey to Florence, Italy, where she seeks to have the Italian language consume her at some cell’s depth. She even moves herself and her family to Italy.

Not long into the book, she writes, “At Tivoli I understand the nature of my Italian project. Like visitors to the villa today, like Hadrian almost two millennia ago, I walk on the surface, the accessible part. But I know, as a writer, that a language exists in the bones, in the marrow.” She longs for that, but in the end realizes it can’t be.

Lahiri structured In Other Words in both English and Italian; every other page is in one language, then switching to the other tongue. It is a mercy to read both languages in the hands of a Pulitzer-prize-winning author. Her Italian is smashing. What a surprise to discover she wrote the manuscript in English, then after years of study and living in the country, she still felt too inept to translate it herself, so had someone else do that for her.

Here’s something she made me realize: I once longed for that authentic, cellular, depth with Italian as well. It has been many years since I lived and studied in Italy, but I remember wanting to sound like a local, wanted ease with accents, vulgarisms and vernaculars. But my yearning did not compare in any way with the sort of obsession that consumed Lahiri. I was a mere dabbler.

I have returned to Italy many times since living there over fifty years ago. The language still comes to me, but in ragged and odd lurchings. Sometimes I can stumble into a phrase or a correct pronoun and can take a bit of glee in it, but the Language lies only on the surface of my skin, way distant from the depth of bone marrow Lahiri sought.

I recommend the In Other Words for anyone, no matter the language you speak. It is a wonderful read.

At this very moment, subject to change and future whim, here are my five favorite books of all time:

The History of Love, Nicole Krauss

Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner

My Name is Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Strout

The Great Gatsby, F.Scott Fitzgerald

The Fixer, Bernard Malamud

OOPs, make it six:

A Gentleman in Moscow Amor Towles

Oh, nirvana, I just discovered an artist I have never encountered before! Felix Vallotton’s work has been around for over a hundred years, and I have not known about it. Where have I been?

See for yourself: Here are two pieces, an oil of two lovers, and a woodcut he did during WWI.

I think I just fell in love.

You would think there’s not much to do on your book, once it publishes.

Ah, not so. If anything, there’s more. There’s a ton more If you want to get you books “out there”. I’ve read that 10% of a writer’s time is devoted to actual writing, the rest–90%–is eaten up with editing, contracting, dealing with publishers, agents, rewriting, and a whole lot more

The real thing: every action you take has its own requirements, idiosyncrasies and quirks. Nothing is direct, nothing standard and it’s extremely time-consuming and intense. You have to respect your work a lot to put this much effort into it. I do, so I do it. And all of it keeps Alzheimer’s at bay, that’s for sure. 

Award-winning Loretta Goldberg interviews me about Come the Morning on Facebook’s Historical Fiction Book Club Group. See it here: https://tinyurl.com/uw4zj2d.

It’s incredible and a bit humbling having someone care about my writing!

Loretta Goldberg, author of the well-received Elizabethan spy novel, The Reversible Mask, interviewed me about my own novels.  It’s amazing to be asked such probing questions, and to try to answer thoughtfully.

See the interview at https://lorettagoldberg.com/an-interview-with-jeannie-burt/.

Hey BookBub members,

If you are a member of BookBub, you can download an eBook of Come the Morning free until the end of November.

Available on Apple, Barnes & Noble and Kobo. The price returns to $5.99 after the end of the month. Enjoy an impossible love story set in the vagaries of Philadelphia’s 1900 society!

At the moment, I’m doing some marketing tests on my two last books. It’s lots of work and fun, but  am boggled the loads of statistics I’m getting back. Am beginning to think I’m going to need a degree in statistics.