Ah… and here we are, friends. A new year, a new beginning. A biting cold winter morning in Maine. Snow lingering on the ground. Dogs stretched out by the fire. Hank Mobley's silky saxophone lines filling the air. A bit of a headache from hanging out with our friends Laura and Walter last night and testing Walter's negroni-making skills. A good rule to live by is to never have a second one. Especially during Dry January. For the record, he makes one so good it's hard to turn down. They're almost as delicious as Laura's pesto pasta. Her no-longer-a-secret secret is blending butter in with the olive oil, basil, and other ingredients. Chef's kiss!
Two books are coming your way in this glorious year of 2025.
The Secrets of Good People lands on March 18th. (I'll elaborate on this one in the coming newsletters.) The origin story of Otis Till, my fave
Red Mountain character, comes alive in September.
Ahhhwwwwoooo!
Of course this means I actually wrote two books last year, a feat I may not attempt to tackle again. I had a few mental breakdowns, shed a bucketful of tears, threw away a ton of words, but in the end, I'm incredibly proud of the finished products.
For the Otis story, Before We Say Goodbye, I bit off a lot, as you'll soon see. What most captured this work is how I approached it. I once read that Abraham Lincoln always spoke with the intent of drawing a reaction, always considering how he could affect his audience. That vibrated with me, so for the last however many books, as I wrote, I always thought about you, the reader, wondering which of your emotional buttons I might hit and then how I might hit them harder. This one was a bit different. Though so many of you have been asking for a new Red Mountain story, I wrote this one for me. I wrote it because I wanted to jump back into Otis's skin, because I enjoy embracing and living in his madness. Ultimately, I wrote the book that I'd want to pull off a shelf and, quite frankly, didn't put too much thought into how it would be received. So we'll see how it resonates with y'all. I laughed and cried in equal measure, and despite those few crises of faith during the writing process, I found tremendous satisfaction and joy.
What's next? I'm tackling this year's book differently too. I have three characters who have been alive in my head since we lived in Spain, and all I know is they're going to crash into each other and into life in the most beautifully raucous ways. A love story or two, a quarter-life crisis, a mid-life crisis, a late-life romance, a woman who rides her Vespa in high-heels and dances the Tango, an estranged father who can't handle retirement, a daughter who can't handle her father, a Michelin-star chef who's caught in the middle, a vacation home on Lake Garda, piles of pasta bolognese and vats of sangiovese and pignaletto, giant chunks of cave-aged Parmigiano-Reggiano, a past riddled with regret. Shrinking meets Fredrik Backman meets Emily Henry meets John Hughes meets Annie Hall, with a shaving of White Lotus on top. A ship of dysfunctional expats who could never sail far enough away from what ails them.
And guess what… it's set in Bologna, Italy, the culinary capital of the galaxy! Mikella, Riggs, and I are off next week for one of two research trips. (Please pinch me…. but gently.) What's fun is I'm fully trusting in the muse and the multiverse and all the things that their story will come alive while I'm there. Because I am nearly plotless at this point, just a jumble of words and phrases and faces dancing in my imagination.
I've never started a book without a title, so I was scrambling to put something on the page, some kind of placeholder. I told my agent that I'd love to have pasta in the title, and maybe regret. Pasta with a Side of Regret? Or… Spaghetti Regretti? She shot both down swiftly, but we had a good laugh. I'm a bit closer to a title now, though I suspect it will come to me once I have my feet on Italian cobblestones.
You might ask what I've been reading lately. With my busy year, I slacked some, but I'm off to a helluva start with
Martyr. Halfway through, I can tell you it's one of the best books I've ever read. This is what happens when a poet writes a novel. Every sentence is worth pausing for. I should just hang it up right now, as I'll never write a sentence as good as Kaveh's worst. Unless his effort takes a bad turn, I will shout this one from the icy cliffs of Maine. I adore his prose, his irreverence, and his fascinating point of view. Talk about a guy who is writing for himself. This book is all heart, an unfiltered masterpiece of raw emotion and literary fire erupting from the volcano of his soul.
