The View From Lake Como: A Q&A with Adriana Trigiani

By Adriana Trigiani, Isabelle McConville / July 8, 2025 at 12:01 am

The author of The Good Left Undone is back with a transportive, jet-setting story following a woman’s journey to her ancestral land while grappling with family tensions and a broken heart. Funny, endearing and empathetic, this novel is a gorgeous getaway. Read on for an exclusive Q&A with author Adriana Trigiani on writing The View From Lake Como.

Hardcover $26.00 ~~$29.00~~

The View From Lake Como: A Novel

By Adriana Trigiani

In Stock Online

Hardcover $26.00 ~~$29.00~~

From the beloved New York Times bestselling author Adriana Trigiani, a “dazzling” storyteller (Washington Post), and a “comedy writer with a heart of gold” (NYT), comes a novel about one woman’s quest to build her own life before it’s too late.

IM: Can you please give us a short introduction to this book and what it’s about?

“In my mind, women are superhuman beings and we’re able to juggle a lot of different things at once.”

AT: This book really means the world to me because I got to look around the world. That’s what I try to do with my novels, and you can’t always do it when you write a historical book. A historical fiction book has got to resonate in the moment, or the readers will not relate. Even if it’s set 500 years ago, it’s got to have something that the characters are grappling with. This is my 25th year as an author, and about five years ago, I thought to myself, ‘When I reach the 25-year mark, what do I want to give the reader?’ Something special. Something that somebody who’s read me all along would feel brings it altogether. With all of the different ways that I’ve told stories, I’ve tried to never repeat myself and I’ve tried to make it original each time so that you’re delighted and and emotionally moved. To say what this book is about really gets into the core of why I wrote it in the first place. I get to travel around the war because of this terrific career, and I get to talk to women one-on-one. From young women to middle-aged women to older women, one common similarity among them is that eventually they fall into a life of taking care of everybody around them and not themselves. This is not a bad thing because in my mind, women are superhuman beings and we’re able to juggle a lot of different things at once. I wanted to write a book about a woman who, when faced with reality, doesn’t shy away from it, but instead summons the best person she is and says I am going to lead the life I want to. Whether it’s you, whether it’s your bestie, whether it’s me or my bestie — or any of my readers that I’m going to see in 24 cities coming up — I want you to have what it is you want from this experience of living, because so often we just end up as the service person.

IM: I think these conversations about familial responsibility can be so delicate because a lot of people feel very strongly that it’s what we’re supposed to do for each other with no questions asked. How did you really want to approach that subject in this book?

“Giuseppina is a primer on how you pull yourself out of the rocks and rubble to get on the path of your own life.”

AT: When you meet Giuseppina Capodimonte Baratta, she’s divorced from the cutest guy in town, and she’s never really tested herself beyond the borders of Lake Como, New Jersey. She works with her Uncle Louie and they travel up and down the Jersey Shore and they install marble. She’s a draftsman, so there’s an element of deep artistry connected to her Italian roots that she really doesn’t understand, but she knows she’s good at it. We gravitate towards careers for things we’re good at — nobody would want me to be their accountant, and nobody would want me to do their math homework. I think when you find yourself in the orbit of something, it’s speaking to you and it’s incumbent upon you to listen. Now this character, Jess, is in the world that she’s supposed to be in since she was 18. Now she’s 33. In that time, she got married, she didn’t go away to college even though it was a dream, and she’s never been to Italy, which is also a big dream of hers. There are a lot of reasons why she hasn’t made it over there yet. She got married, which adds a few years, she’s working with her uncle, which adds a few years, too. Is all of this starting to sound familiar to you? You know you have a Giuseppina in your life— we all do. It’s someone who’s the spackler; when mom and dad get a shoulder replaced or a knee replaced, or they’re getting into those years where they need some extra help, Giuseppina is the person living in the basement trying to help. She does Sunday dinner — which is a big thing. It’s the work level of a holiday dinner every Sunday and she just does it on her own. Nobody even thinks to help her. Her sister has children, her brother has children, but they’re tight unit. They grew up in a home with economic uncertainty, and anybody who grew up with economic uncertainty will tell you that it never leaves you. Giuseppina is a primer on how you pull yourself out of the rocks and rubble to get on the path of your own life.

IM: Do you remember the initial spark that made you want to write this book?

AT: This is a crazy story; more than 10 years ago, I was in Philadelphia on a book tour at a Barnes & Noble. My cousin shows up with this giant yellow box and says, with tears in her eyes, that it was a box of things our great grandmother left behind. She gave it to me and I figured out a way to get it back to New York. As you know, every novel I write has some kind of deep family connection. My great grandmother lived until 1929, but I didn’t want to write about that era again because I had just written The Good Left Undone. I let it marinate for 10 years. In that box was her nightgown; at the turn of the last century, it was popular to hand stitch a cotton nightgown with your own signature in red thread. My grandmother’s said Josephina on it, and I knew there was a story there. I carried it around in this clear plastic bag forever to give me inspiration. I found out my great grandmother’s story, which I knew from my grandmother, but I needed more information. I did the research and found out that though she died young at 42, she’d faced a big romantic dilemma and she chose my great grandfather. She came to America and set off six children, six families, six stories. I kept that nightgown – it’s my talisman. I set the story now because I wanted to speak directly to a modern, contemporary audience of women. My great grandmother is alive and well in the pages of these books.

IM: Did you ever get any questions about carrying that nightgown around?

AT: I’d bring it and then realized it kept making me cry. I don’t bring it anymore because it’s just too emotional for me. It was kept in perfect condition; in 100 years, even if someone found a garment I wore, it wouldn’t hold up in the same way. The craftsmanship isn’t there. I come from craftspeople — seamstresses, shoemakers, farmers. a craft contour farming. I consider all of a craft. My family didn’t do just one job and it’s very natural for me to do more than one job. If you find something you really, really love, do it until you die.

IM: So many people in the world don’t have that. They could spend their entire lives searching for it.

“I can’t imagine a life where I’m not doing this. Even if the worst happened and nobody wanted to read it, I’d still find a way to do it.”

AT: My husband always gets on me about this. He says, Do you realize how lucky you are that you knew what you wanted to do? I can’t imagine a life where I’m not doing this. Even if the worst happened and nobody wanted to read it, I’d still find a way to do it.

IM: You also start the book with this quote: “Italians are fortunate. They can always cry it away or sing it away, or love it away.” Can you talk about how that functions in this book?

AT: When I’m writing, I only read nonfiction. I don’t want to be influenced by another novel while I write. The quote is from a book by Ludwig Bemelmans— I’m on a Bemelmans kick because Bemelmans wrote Madeline and illustrated it at the Carlyle Hotel. I became quite obsessed with this nonfiction book that he wrote, To the One I Love the Best. This character, Elsie de Wolfe, is somebody I’ve written about before. She was America’s premier decorator, and she was driving in Central Park with Ludwig in this book. She sees an Italian kid litter on the ground and they have a whole conversation about Italians. She says, “You’ve got to envy them— they can either cry it away, sing it away, or they can love it away.” Each piece of that quote fed into the storyline. This idea that you can emotionally walk the landscape of your life with those three emotions appealed to me as a superstructure for a novel.

IM: Something else that I really loved about this book was a scene where Jess meets Angelo and a romance unfolds between them. Angelo tells her that Italy is either a destination or an escape. Can you tell me more about that?

“Travel, meet everyone you can, find an escape in anything.”

AT: Angelo Strazza, a guilder, is a native Italian. He’s seen many people come to Carrara to see the place where Michelangelo got his marble. He sees the tourist for what the tourist is. When he says destination, he’s speaking directly to her because he believes that’s what this is for Jess. He’s thinking, ‘Baby, you’re in love with Italy and you ain’t going home.’ Jess just doesn’t know that yet. I love characters like that — he knows who she is before she does. I find that incredibly romantic. We all want to be understood; like, tell me who you think I am from the lens of you. It’s very romantic. For the escape aspect, it’s what I encourage everyone to do. Travel, meet everyone you can, find an escape in anything. In the country, in a church, in a field of sunflowers at nightfall when you watch them actually pray. The flowers dip their heads towards the ground when the sun goes away. You can find tiny lessons like that everywhere in the world. If you go to a silk mill, they show you the worms making the silk and then you’ll learn about the accidents of silk making. These are the things that you could only learn when you go to a foreign country, whether it’s Spain or France or Africa or South America— anywhere in the world that’s not where you’re from. That’s what he means by destination or escape.

IM: I love what you just said about those little details and lessons that we can learn from just looking out our windows and going outside. You include a lot of those vivid details in your writing, and you really ignite all five senses in this book.

AT: Human beings have five senses, but I always kick in a sixth one: humor. That’s why I wrote a comedy. To me, the five senses must be engaged in the creation of a novel because the tactile nature is what puts me directly in your ear. When Jess touches the marble and feels how cold it is, we can relate because we’ve all had that experience.

IM: That also makes me think about Jess noticing the smell of water hitting the marble while being in Italy.

AT: That’s the only line I said I’d never cut from this book. When rain hits stone, there’s a scent it releases called petrichor. Everybody in the world knows what we’re talking about when we say that because they’ve been somewhere and experienced it. It’s a smoky, earthy, sharp scent of stone. It’s like the stone is speaking to you saying, ‘hey, you know, I once was underground. Don’t get too excited.’ When you’re in Italy and you go into these piazzas that are built of stone from the 13th century and the rain hits it, you realize it’s still the same smell. You feel a unity through the past. A novel has to be personal. Manufactured worlds are of no interest to me. What are you really feeling? I believe that’s why people come back and read you again. They feel that authenticity.

IM: You’re taking the Lake Como show on the road soon! How are you feeling about it?

AT: We’re rehearsing and I feel very excited— which means I’m very nervous, but the nerves will hopefully subside a little bit once we’re up and running. I spend all my time in my work life thinking about how I can serve you as the reader. What do you need from me? What can I offer you within my limited talents and skill set? I felt like I wanted to do something really special in my 25th year publishing my 21st book, The View from Lake Como. I really wanted to do something special. I wrote a show that is about women in my family and I called my brother because I love family acts. I started out with my brother Michael, and we sang at weddings when we were little. There would be no reason being raised in Big Stone Gap, VA, that I would think that show business would ever be a possibility for me. I consider literature to be show business. I believe that when I offer you a book, I want to take you on a journey. It isn’t a manual for how to build a car— it’s a manual for how to feed your soul.

IM: Adriana, thank you so much for your time today.

AT: Thank you for having me.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.