I get asked this question all the time, and I'm afraid the embarrassing answer is that I followed my stomach--I've always loved Italian food! My family isn't Italian or Italian-American at all (I'm descended from Eastern European and Austrian Jews). After studying the language in college for three years, I stumbled into a summer study program in Urbino (where the book is set), and I spent the summer between my junior and senior years there. I fell in love with the place. The day after my college graduation, I got on a plane to Italy and I lived in Urbino, not very legally, for a couple years. I still go back every year (I ended up marrying my then-boyfriend, so all his family is there). It's an incredibly special place to me. I love New York, too, but Urbino is the antidote to it--a place where nobody is cool, and nothing special is going on most days, and something that happened 200 years ago is a relatively recent event.

Your book is not just about Italy--it's about personal history.  Has writing this book brought out an interest in your own family history?

On both my mother's and my father's sides of the family, I've found out about family legends that were completely false. My paternal grandfather claimed to have come to the United States alone and pulled himself up by his bootstraps, but just recently we discovered that he'd actually come with his entire family when he was three, only his mother died soon after they arrived (she got an infection from an illegal abortion, I think) and his father went back to Austria with his little sister and dumped my grandfather with relatives. That seems like a huge thing to have hidden all those years. On my mother's side, we'd always been told that my great-grandfather fled Russia because he didn't want to be conscripted into the Tsar's army (not a good scene for Jewish men in particular), but when a cousin of my mother's did some genealogical research years ago, he discovered that he'd actually gotten into a fight with someone and killed him. The next day he skipped town. All of that certainly made me think about family mythology and how we often romanticize the stories of our ancestors.

You're also an editor for the Best New American Voices anthology series, which includes guest editors such as Joyce Carol Oates and Francine Prose. How do you find the best new voices and who do you think are some upcoming writers of interest?

All the submissions for Best New American Voices come from writing programs--either MFA programs or non-degree programs like the 92nd Street Y. One of the best things about editing the anthology is watching writers we've published develop and grow. We published a story by Kiran Desai, who just won the Booker for The Inheritance of Loss. I'm a big fan of Michael Lowenthal, whose new novel is Charity Girl, and Maile Meloy, Michelle Wildgen, Cheryl Strayed, Julie Orringer, Katharine Noel, Eric Puchner, and the many other Best New American Voices "alumni" who have gone on to write beautiful books. I think the fact that that list is so long is a testament to our process and to the concept of the anthology.
 

You and I attended NYU together. Were there writers there whom you admired? Who are your writing mentors?

NYU came at just the right time for me, and I had great luck with all the workshops I took there. Even the one bad workshop I was in, with Edna O'Brien, was well-timed, because it was my last semester there and I was mentally dragging my feet about leaving, and being in a class I disliked helped kick me out of the nest. I studied with Nick Christopher, Dani Shapiro, and Fenton Johnson, and Chuck Wachtel was my advisor. I like all their work, although they're not mentors to me in the sense that they call me up and cheer me on or anything. I learned a lot from each of them, and very different things from each. I never took a writing workshop with Doctorow, but I think he's one of our greatest living writers. I'd love to get him to be guest editor for the anthology one year--I keep emailing him about it, and maybe I'll wear him down eventually (or maybe this public ass-kissing will convince him).

But the best thing about NYU was being part of a community of writers. I still have a group of fellow former students I exchange writing with once a month. That alone would be worth the cost of tuition. Also, it forced me to realize that being a writer wasn't something that was going to happen to me--that I had to get my ass in the chair on a regular basis and do the actual work. I think before that I thought a manuscript would fall from the sky one day, and I'd turn around and sell it. It's a cliché to say what hard work writing is, but it hadn't really sunk in for me until I was at NYU that I was choosing this life, and it was going to be challenging, but I'd better get cracking.

What is your writing process like? Do you outline?

I don't outline, but maybe I should! It always sounds like a nice way to work, but when I've tried it just tends to kill off the story. I like to write in my bedroom with a laptop (away from the desk where I do "money work"), and I usually write in the morning. In fact, I try not to answer the phone or check email until noon, but I'm not always successful. There's a certain kind of writing that I think of as "writing around," when I have a half-baked idea of the story, but it's not quite there yet. Then once I figure it out, I'm very focused and can write for as long as four or five hours a day. With Inheritance, the Luigi chapters flowed easily, and most of them I drafted in a week or so, which was kind of magical. I have to remind myself constantly that if I don't do the first banging-my-head-against-the-wall part, the second part--the fun part, when you're just hearing the story in your head and transcribing it--never comes. I'm also a major, major reviser. There were probably more than a dozen versions of Inheritance. I kept a file of all the text I cut, and it's three or four times longer than the finished manuscript.

You also write nonfiction for magazines and newspapers. Do you think you'd like to write more fiction in the future? What can we expect from you next?