Leah Franqui's new novel is America for Beginners.From her Q&A with Adam Vitcavage at Writer's Bone:
Adam Vitcavage: Starting with a few questions directly related to this book, the novel follows a woman named Pival dealing with grief. Was there a particular event that inspired this plot?Visit Leah Franqui's website.
Leah Franqui: There absolutely is an event that inspired this novel, but the plot about Pival’s grief was an act of imagination. When my now-husband and I graduated from graduate school, his parents and older sister came to our commencement from India. They had never been to the United States, nor outside of India much if at all before they came, and they had decided that after the graduation events they would take a tour of the United States, despite my husband’s loud and vocal protests. All their friends had done it, this is what people do, and for a lot of people there is this mentality in travel that if you are going to do it you have to cover as much ground as possible, it’s like Pokémon Go, you gotta catch ‘em all! Americans do this in Europe, you know, cover five countries in seven days or something like that. So even though it went against his foundational principles, my husband decided if his parents were going to take this trip covering seven cities in 11 days, he would have to go with them.
It was that trip, which, by the way, expressly guaranteed 11 Indian dinners, and really meeting my now-in-laws for the first time, that inspired this novel. Getting to know them also really informed this story. But it was also my mother-in-law’s negative reaction to homosexuality, which was...[read on]
--Marshal Zeringue