My next book is now on Goodreads!
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
Here is the back story for my new book, EVERY TIME WE SAY GOODBYE, plus the cast of characters followed by an excerpt!
Whenever I start writing a new book, I sit down at my laptop and just start typing, and as I do so, I am most motivated by readers' pleas for "more." This is why each of my books, although they stand alone, take place in the same world.
Below are the very first words I wrote two years ago, so they have special meaning for me. I was first inspired to write a book set in the movie industry by an April 2021 family re-watch of Francois Truffaut's movie DAY FOR NIGHT. I remember being impressed by Truffaut's script girls and remarking to my family that I wanted to write a book called SCRIPT GIRLS and oh, how they laughed.
But a few weeks later, I started typing and immediately this very Gilbert Osmond-like character from THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY shows up on Rome's Via Sacra trying to "hit on" a beautiful woman he has noticed before. I wrote the following in one go, showed it to my agent and editor, and they both said, keep going. So I did, for another year. The hardest year I have ever had as a writer. I was terrified the entire time I wrote. I took long - sometimes months-long - breaks (the research material was emotionally harrowing). I showed it only to my husband, in two stages, as I always do. Then I spent the past year editing it, and each day, with each new or different or excised word, I could feel the MS becoming something more special to me than I could ever have conceived. I am stupidly, crazily proud of this book. I will never write a better one.
As with my first two books, there is another large cast of characters. I have listed them below:
CAST OF CHARACTERS
THE EXPATRIATES
Vivien Lowry … disaffected London playwright
Sir Alfred Jonathan Knox … British industrialist & philanthropist
Lady Browning … bestselling author better known as Daphne du Maurier
Peggy Guggenheim … famous New York heiress & art collector
Levi Bassano … New York scriptwriter & former Field Photo soldier
Douglas Curtis … Hollywood director & former WWII Commander of Field Photo Unit
John Lassiter … an American living in Rome
Claudia Jones … Hollywood movie star
Ada “Bricktop” Smith … Nightclub owner
Ava Gardner … Hollywood movie star
Tabitha Knight … London shopgirl at The Sunwise Turn
Frances Knight … Hampshire wife & mother
Mimi Harrison … London stage actress & former Hollywood movie star
Milko Skofic … former Yugoslavian refugee & doctor
~
THE ITALIANS
La Scolaretta … Cinecittà cutter & resistance fighter
Margarita Pacelli Lassiter … war orphan
Marco Marchetti … Vatican cardinal
Anita Pacelli … Italian movie star
Nino Tremonti … Neapolitan prince & filmmaker
Sister Justina … Canossian Daughter of Charity
Gabriella Giacometti … reporter for LIFE magazine
Sophia Loren … Italian movie star
Gina Lollobrigida … Italian Movie star
I hope you enjoy the excerpt - and most of all, I hope this finds you well and looking forward to the future with hope and peace, in the same way that your readership and support enables me to do.
xo Natalie
_______________________________
Chapter Three
~
The Ides of March, 1955
Rome, Italy
Everything in life was a matter of pacing.
Lassiter had noticed her, or thought he noticed her (could he be slipping?), a couple of times now. The first had been on a mild February day as he had sneaked out of a private meeting at Cinecittà. She had rounded the corner of the studio on a peacock-blue bicycle, the front wicker basket holding a stack of paper weighted down by a pair of tangled high heels. Her feet were bare, and immediately he assumed she was one of the script girls. Or—better yet—an actress, with her wavy raven-black hair and stylish manner.
The second time had been at Peggy Guggenheim’s Carnival party on Mardi Gras a few weeks back. They had both been in costume and that must have slowed him down—either way, by the time he had made the connection, she was gone.
He had not seen her at the studio since. He had certainly not expected to find her here, wandering alone through the Via Sacra. He liked to cut through the Forum as he slipped home from Anita’s apartments, long before the photographers were up. At dawn, the cats had the run of the place and it made him feel positively feral. In his early fifties, he still showed the American athleticism of his lost youth, strolling the sampietrini of Rome’s battered post-war streets with the nimbleness of a man half his age.
When he saw her standing there in her white knotted men’s shirt and bright peasant skirt, pensively taking bites of a maritozzi still in its café wrapper, he wondered if now was the time to say something. In a movie it would have been the perfect moment: minute nineteen out of ninety and the third encounter between the leads.
Then, as with so much in the movie industry, it was taken out of his hands. She turned back to the blue bicycle leaning against a two-thousand-year-old cracked column, finally noticed him, and walked on past. If she recognized him, she gave no sign of it.
“Mi scusi—”
She wheeled around at his words, wiped a bit of cream from the corner of her lips, and gave a smile that bordered on a smirk. “Don’t strain yourself. I’m a foreigner, too.”
He felt the back of his neck tighten. He had been living in Italy for nearly a decade. “Actually, I live here.”
“So do I.”
“I mean I have done, for many years.”
“I don’t think that’s what makes someone Italian, do you?”
He saw that she was joking with him in that very contrarian, British way that he had always found tiring, even in a woman as beautiful as her. He also saw that she was not going to make this easy for him. “I believe we were both at Peggy’s Carnival bash.”
She pitched the now-empty pastry wrapper into the bicycle basket. “I don’t recall being introduced.”
He extended his hand. “John. John Lassiter. Artemis Productions.”
The sun was slowly rising behind him and she shaded her eyes with her right hand to peer more closely at him.
“The warrior goddess,” was all she replied.
“Among other things.” He quickened his pace ahead of her to reach the bicycle and turn it around in his hands, then motioned for her to walk as he gentlemanly steered the bike. Noticing the script in the basket next to the crumpled pastry wrap, he tried again. “You’re in Teatro 5, right? Starring in…?”
“Not in. On.” She looked amused by his reaction. “I’m doctoring the script for When All Else Fails.”
“I hear it’s in rough shape.”
“It’s as crumpled as that wrapper.” She laughed wryly. “I appreciate your directness, at least. None of the Italians on set seem fussed—about anything.”
The words at least did not escape him. He had only a few yards left of Via Sacra to make his pitch. “Do you walk through here often?”
She shook her head. “Only for inspiration—and the history, of course. Today is the Ides of March, as you know.”
He did not know. For all his morning-after walks, Lassiter was unaware that they were standing on the exact spot where Julius Caesar had been condemned by Marc Antony to his unfortunate end. The producer had huge gaps in his education that he had spent a lifetime hiding through almost any means short of actually opening a book.
“Exactly,” was all he said instead.
As they exited onto the pavement alongside the screeching, careening cars of the Via Fori Imperiali, she reached for the bicycle handles. He let his taut, tanned arms brush against hers as she did so, and was pleased that she did not step back as quickly as she could have.
“Well, see you at the studio, Mr. Artemis.”
“Lassiter,” he was pained to have to correct her. But she only smiled, and he realized she was teasing him again. “And you are?”
“Lowry. Vivien.”
She ascended the bicycle and sped off, but he noticed she looked back at the corner. He had paced it well enough in the end.
Here is the back story for my new book, EVERY TIME WE SAY GOODBYE, plus the cast of characters followed by an excerpt!
Whenever I start writing a new book, I sit down at my laptop and just start typing, and as I do so, I am most motivated by readers' pleas for "more." This is why each of my books, although they stand alone, take place in the same world.
Below are the very first words I wrote two years ago, so they have special meaning for me. I was first inspired to write a book set in the movie industry by an April 2021 family re-watch of Francois Truffaut's movie DAY FOR NIGHT. I remember being impressed by Truffaut's script girls and remarking to my family that I wanted to write a book called SCRIPT GIRLS and oh, how they laughed.
But a few weeks later, I started typing and immediately this very Gilbert Osmond-like character from THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY shows up on Rome's Via Sacra trying to "hit on" a beautiful woman he has noticed before. I wrote the following in one go, showed it to my agent and editor, and they both said, keep going. So I did, for another year. The hardest year I have ever had as a writer. I was terrified the entire time I wrote. I took long - sometimes months-long - breaks (the research material was emotionally harrowing). I showed it only to my husband, in two stages, as I always do. Then I spent the past year editing it, and each day, with each new or different or excised word, I could feel the MS becoming something more special to me than I could ever have conceived. I am stupidly, crazily proud of this book. I will never write a better one.
As with my first two books, there is another large cast of characters. I have listed them below:
CAST OF CHARACTERS
THE EXPATRIATES
Vivien Lowry … disaffected London playwright
Sir Alfred Jonathan Knox … British industrialist & philanthropist
Lady Browning … bestselling author better known as Daphne du Maurier
Peggy Guggenheim … famous New York heiress & art collector
Levi Bassano … New York scriptwriter & former Field Photo soldier
Douglas Curtis … Hollywood director & former WWII Commander of Field Photo Unit
John Lassiter … an American living in Rome
Claudia Jones … Hollywood movie star
Ada “Bricktop” Smith … Nightclub owner
Ava Gardner … Hollywood movie star
Tabitha Knight … London shopgirl at The Sunwise Turn
Frances Knight … Hampshire wife & mother
Mimi Harrison … London stage actress & former Hollywood movie star
Milko Skofic … former Yugoslavian refugee & doctor
~
THE ITALIANS
La Scolaretta … Cinecittà cutter & resistance fighter
Margarita Pacelli Lassiter … war orphan
Marco Marchetti … Vatican cardinal
Anita Pacelli … Italian movie star
Nino Tremonti … Neapolitan prince & filmmaker
Sister Justina … Canossian Daughter of Charity
Gabriella Giacometti … reporter for LIFE magazine
Sophia Loren … Italian movie star
Gina Lollobrigida … Italian Movie star
I hope you enjoy the excerpt - and most of all, I hope this finds you well and looking forward to the future with hope and peace, in the same way that your readership and support enables me to do.
xo Natalie
_______________________________
Chapter Three
~
The Ides of March, 1955
Rome, Italy
Everything in life was a matter of pacing.
Lassiter had noticed her, or thought he noticed her (could he be slipping?), a couple of times now. The first had been on a mild February day as he had sneaked out of a private meeting at Cinecittà. She had rounded the corner of the studio on a peacock-blue bicycle, the front wicker basket holding a stack of paper weighted down by a pair of tangled high heels. Her feet were bare, and immediately he assumed she was one of the script girls. Or—better yet—an actress, with her wavy raven-black hair and stylish manner.
The second time had been at Peggy Guggenheim’s Carnival party on Mardi Gras a few weeks back. They had both been in costume and that must have slowed him down—either way, by the time he had made the connection, she was gone.
He had not seen her at the studio since. He had certainly not expected to find her here, wandering alone through the Via Sacra. He liked to cut through the Forum as he slipped home from Anita’s apartments, long before the photographers were up. At dawn, the cats had the run of the place and it made him feel positively feral. In his early fifties, he still showed the American athleticism of his lost youth, strolling the sampietrini of Rome’s battered post-war streets with the nimbleness of a man half his age.
When he saw her standing there in her white knotted men’s shirt and bright peasant skirt, pensively taking bites of a maritozzi still in its café wrapper, he wondered if now was the time to say something. In a movie it would have been the perfect moment: minute nineteen out of ninety and the third encounter between the leads.
Then, as with so much in the movie industry, it was taken out of his hands. She turned back to the blue bicycle leaning against a two-thousand-year-old cracked column, finally noticed him, and walked on past. If she recognized him, she gave no sign of it.
“Mi scusi—”
She wheeled around at his words, wiped a bit of cream from the corner of her lips, and gave a smile that bordered on a smirk. “Don’t strain yourself. I’m a foreigner, too.”
He felt the back of his neck tighten. He had been living in Italy for nearly a decade. “Actually, I live here.”
“So do I.”
“I mean I have done, for many years.”
“I don’t think that’s what makes someone Italian, do you?”
He saw that she was joking with him in that very contrarian, British way that he had always found tiring, even in a woman as beautiful as her. He also saw that she was not going to make this easy for him. “I believe we were both at Peggy’s Carnival bash.”
She pitched the now-empty pastry wrapper into the bicycle basket. “I don’t recall being introduced.”
He extended his hand. “John. John Lassiter. Artemis Productions.”
The sun was slowly rising behind him and she shaded her eyes with her right hand to peer more closely at him.
“The warrior goddess,” was all she replied.
“Among other things.” He quickened his pace ahead of her to reach the bicycle and turn it around in his hands, then motioned for her to walk as he gentlemanly steered the bike. Noticing the script in the basket next to the crumpled pastry wrap, he tried again. “You’re in Teatro 5, right? Starring in…?”
“Not in. On.” She looked amused by his reaction. “I’m doctoring the script for When All Else Fails.”
“I hear it’s in rough shape.”
“It’s as crumpled as that wrapper.” She laughed wryly. “I appreciate your directness, at least. None of the Italians on set seem fussed—about anything.”
The words at least did not escape him. He had only a few yards left of Via Sacra to make his pitch. “Do you walk through here often?”
She shook her head. “Only for inspiration—and the history, of course. Today is the Ides of March, as you know.”
He did not know. For all his morning-after walks, Lassiter was unaware that they were standing on the exact spot where Julius Caesar had been condemned by Marc Antony to his unfortunate end. The producer had huge gaps in his education that he had spent a lifetime hiding through almost any means short of actually opening a book.
“Exactly,” was all he said instead.
As they exited onto the pavement alongside the screeching, careening cars of the Via Fori Imperiali, she reached for the bicycle handles. He let his taut, tanned arms brush against hers as she did so, and was pleased that she did not step back as quickly as she could have.
“Well, see you at the studio, Mr. Artemis.”
“Lassiter,” he was pained to have to correct her. But she only smiled, and he realized she was teasing him again. “And you are?”
“Lowry. Vivien.”
She ascended the bicycle and sped off, but he noticed she looked back at the corner. He had paced it well enough in the end.
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