Q&A with Juliet Grames

 

Photo by Katherine Grames

 

 

Juliet Grames is the author of the new novel The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia. She also has written the novel The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna. She is the editorial director at Soho Press in New York.

 

Q: What inspired you to write The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia?

 

A: The spark came to me with the true story of an Italian immigrant man who disappeared at the turn of the 20th century. I'm a lifelong student of the Italian diaspora, which I was lucky enough to be born into, and in the course of my research I've conducted many interviews with immigrants and their children and grandchildren.

 

One story that came up again and again was that of the missing immigrant man: the one who had sailed to American seeking opportunity and then was never heard from again. These stories started to stack up for me with preoccupying resonance, in part because I knew I had such missing men in my own family.

 

What happened to them? Were they victims of the brutality of immigrant life, or victims of the organized criminal syndicates that preyed upon and controlled every facet of the immigrant experience, or perhaps victims of their own weaknesses? I know I and so many other descendants of immigrants are haunted by our missing antecedents.

 

The novel was born out of those questions--what happened to them, and who should we be angry at? 

 

Q: The Boston Globe review of the novel says, “Grames structures this deeply compelling, well-crafted mystery in a Golden Age style reminiscent of classics by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. Yet the literary heart of this brilliant novel, its probing meditations on class, power, and the inevitability of crime, is rendered with the same nuance and intensity as Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet.” What do you think of those comparisons?

 

A: I am absurdly flattered! Those are three of my personal favorites.  

 

Q: How did you create your character Francesca Loftfield?

 

A: Francesca is fictitious, but her story is inspired by a real person, the writer Ann Cornelisen, a Vassar graduate who moved to Italy in 1954 and worked for Save the Children for 20 years.

 

I revere Cornelisen's work and in my many rereads came to the conclusion that a person like her--an outsider with a nonprofit's unfettered access to personal information about an otherwise impenetrably reserved village--could be the perfect amateur sleuth to take on an investigation into the truth about a town's missing immigrant men.

 

I used some strokes of Cornelisen's life to make the premise of Francesca's job realistic, but I superimposed an Italian-American identity drawn from elements of women I had interviewed during my research. I wanted her to be an idealist with the stubborn desire to do good against all odds. 

 

Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?

 

A: I started researching the book in 2017, beginning with a scouting trip to the Aspromonte mountains, where it is set, and I published it in 2024, so you could say I've put in seven years of research, although I confess that even now that the book is done and printed I am still digging up new chapters of inquiry.

 

I had a couple central topics I worked on. I'm not even sure where to start on what findings especially surprised me--there was so much delight and sadness to uncover.

 

Maybe what was most life-changing for me in this process was reading about humanitarians and progressive movement ideology: thinking about how to be a good person when the system you live within is at odds with your personal morality.  

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: A novel about Italy in World War I--I am still in the research phase, but I've got piles of notes!  

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Thank you so much for these lovely questions! 

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Juliet Grames.