Ellen Cooney

Ellen Cooney is the author of seven novels including the newly published Lambrusco. Her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Literary Review, and Glimmer Train, among other publications.

From a Q & A at her publisher's website:

How did an author with an Irish surname, living in coastal Maine, come to create Lambrusco, a novel epitomizing–and even mythologizing–the Italian partisan movement in the crucial war years of the early 1940’s?

The province of my novel, Emilia-Romagna on the Adriatic coast, is sort of where New England, my always home, is located in America. I come from Italians on my mother’s side. The Cooney is from my dad’s family who in fact are English, from Yorkshire, in Bronte country. I’ve always been keenly aware that I’m an American because of immigrants from two very different countries. As my English grandmother used to say–and she had spotted me as a baby writer from the get-go–“You get your words from us, and your spirit from those Italians.” I’m remembering myself at the age of about twelve, devouring Bronte novels with a background soundtrack of my Italian grandmother’s beloved Caruso. In the air are smells of tomatoes and garlic, along with steam from a pasta pot. On tv is one of the WWII films my dad–a WWII vet–never wanted to stop watching or talking about. I’d go from a Bronte to an American war novel without missing a beat.

The roots of this novel go deep. My Italian grandfather was a barber and one day as a very young kid–a kid who was always in the library–I found a picture of Mussolini in an old copy of Life magazine. My nonno looked so much like him, I became very nervous; I knew what a Fascist was. Although I was heartily assured that our family was on the side of the good guys, I went more with the barber thing, and cooked up a nonno as my own personal Figaro, of the Rossini. I’d known for ages I would have to get around to writing an Italian novel, but I kept putting it off, hoping it would take me over one day like a force of nature. Which it did.

Read the entire Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue