Frances Mayes on Writing and Relationships

Yesterday I had the pleasure of hearing the great Frances Mayes talk about her most recent novel, A Great Marriage, at my local bookstore, Bookmarks. Unlike some of their events, this was a small and intimate affair inside the shop, which seemed appropriate for an author who has pulled so many of us into her life and her adventures for so many years. And Frances was, in a word, delightful.

For forty-five minutes she cracked both us and herself up with stories about Italy (of course), and writing, and relationships with family and partners. There was the story about how she discovered who Diane Lane was, after she had been cast to portray Mayes in Under the Tuscan Sun. Mayes saw her in the film Unfaithful while in Greece and described Lane as “smoldering.” And then, recalled telling her husband, Ed, “She’s going to need to cool it off a little.”

I particularly loved her gems on writing, of course. Mayes started out as an English professor and a poet, turned to memoir with Under the Tuscan Sun, then travel books, cookbooks, and now novels. She traced her journey through those mediums (her least favorite: the cookbooks), how her family didn’t speak to her for seven years (!) after one of her memoirs, and her approach to writing. She talked about how the decision to buy and renovate a house in Tuscany, which everyone told her was a mistake, helped her to make other decisions down the road, like quitting her job to write full-time.

Her latest book, which I have not yet read, is about love and relationships and the difference between what makes a good marriage and a great one. It is, as Mayes said, about “enduring one’s family, and how families endure.” It starts with the simple line, “The wine spilled.” That line kicks off a scene at an engagement party that throws a relationship into chaos and drives the plot of the book. As she told us, “A first line should carry you throughout the book.” I immediately came home and reevaluated the one in my current work in progress.

I also loved how she talked about place and how it shapes not only her writing but her as a writer. Though she’s known as the writer who put Tuscany on the map for American audiences, Mayes has spent most of her life in the American south. And, as she shared, the geography of the south – everything from flowing rivers to hurricanes to the type of foliage that exists here – as well as the people of the south, have defined her. She would be a different writer had she been from somewhere else: “Southerners are warm and generous and hospitable, but at their heart they’re secretive and fatalistic.” There is a big secret in this book (which she did not share with us!), which, while fictionalized, draws on her own discovery of a long-held family secret.

But perhaps my favorite thing she said was this: “I just write when I want to. It works out. Some writers self-flagellate if they don’t meet their daily word count. Why get upset and not have your gin and tonic at six o’clock?” Why indeed, Frances. To have built a full and successful career based on love, and self-discovery, and exploring new places, and taking risks, and celebrating living. We should all be so lucky, and so smart.