Adriana Trigiani: Books with Passion and Real Life

Adriana Trigiani is a force of nature. Her cloud of curly corvine hair and her big bright smile are just as expressive of her Italian descent as her spontaneity and playfulness are.
 

Adriana Trigiani and Anthony J. Tamburri

Calandra Institute hosted a reading by Trigiani on November 8. The only book on the table was “Don’t Sing at the Table: Life Lessons from my Grandmothers”, released in paperback just a few days ago, but the people in the audience were fully equipped with their consumed-after-compulsive-rereading copies of their favorite novels.
 

Adriana took the time to sign them one by one, while asking each person their names and surnames, their families’ provenance, their relationship with this or that person with a similar sounding surname or provenance – that’s the Italian way to meet and greet.
 

A meant-to-be playwright with an unplanned career twist as a novelist, Trigiani is a passionate and theatrical speaker and writer, and a lover of people and characters, which tend to fuse in her stories whenever she stumbles upon a fascinating name, a captivating life story, a record to listen compulsively (she confessed that happened with Caruso’s), or a ledger belonging to her grandmother with carefully noted lists of surnames and sums of money.
 

Trigiani has written over a dozen novels – all bestsellers – and she is not stopping now.

In fact, while mentioning that she is working hard to transpose some of her novels to films (Very Valentine, Big Stone Gap which will be the first, The Shoemaker’s Wife, and Lucia, Lucia), Trigiani disclosed some juicy indiscretions on her next work, “The Shoemaker’s Wife”, that will be released next Spring.
 

The novel will narrate the love story between Enza and Ciro on a time span of forty years in the 1900s, embracing both of the world wars.
 

Enza is a new name Trigiani gave to her character Lucia, to further develop it after she found a note left by grandma Lucia  in a box stocked with memories and papers: two hand-written pages titled “My Life Story”, and a narration that stopped at the date and hour of her husband’s death for cancer.
 

Real life is a constant source of inspiration for Trigiani, who confesses to prefer biographies and nonfiction to novels. When a lady in the audience compliments Adriana on “Lucia, Lucia”, she said: “Why do you love it? Because you know women like that, don’t you?”

The Italian-American values that influenced Trigiani’s growth, and the one of many of her most passionate readers, are summarized in the “Manifesto” she included in “Don’t Sing at the Table”.
 

The Manifesto is a lesson on how to be a woman in the purest feminist sense: independence, determination, strength and coherence are the common threads of it, and their actualization in Trigiani’s characters is what makes her novels so loved and popular.
 

Not without commotion, Adriana read the Manifesto. Then she asked the crowd: “Didn’t you hear all that in your houses?”
 

If you didn’t, you can read about it in Adriana’s books, between digressions of luscious foods and how to prepare it, love stories, irony and drama.

More info: http://www.adrianatrigiani.com/