Interview with Caroline Montague, Author of An Italian Affair

Caroline won her first National Poetry competition at 10 years old and from that moment dreamed of being a writer. After juggling motherhood with modelling assignments, she founded an Interior Design Company working on many projects in the UK and abroad. Her second marriage to the widowed Conroy Harrowby brought four stepchildren into her life, giving her a wider audience for her imaginative bedtime stories. As a family they all live at the Harrowby ancestral home, Burnt Norton, which famously inspired T S Eliot to write the first of his “Four Quartets”. 

We’re delighted to feature this interview with her!

Thank you so much for joining us on WWWB, Caroline!

Tell us about your beginning, where are you from?

My childhood was spent in London and in Oxfordshire. My father was a dentist and maxillofacial surgeon, my mother was a barrister, so they both needed to get to London easily. I often thought my father was happier in a calving pen bringing new life into the world, than he was doing root canals!.

How did your childhood impact the writer you’ve become?

My father always encouraged my writing. Every birthday he required a poem rather than a present, so it became a tradition. What began as a yearly challenge, soon became a passion. I loved words and language and most of all I loved stories.

When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?

When I recovered from the early humiliation of being thrown out of my dancing class aged six. I quickly realised that praise was far more rewarding than criticism. It was evident that I would never actually be a prima ballerina, so I needed to do something that I was actually good at.

How has writing changed you as a person?

I think it has made me more patient and definitely more determined. It can take years to get a book deal, years to write a book. In my case I have to know my characters before I embark on my story, so I build them up in my head and indeed visually.

I make a board on pinterest and I dress my characters, choosing their hairstyles, putting them in the right period clothes. When the writing begins, I have to push through the days when I have writer’s block and force myself to write until the doors open again. And oh my goodness I have to stand up when I get knocked down. Rejection is a horrible thing, bad reviews are terrible, but I have to brush myself off and keep on going. I think most writers are sensitive and vulnerable, so it is really difficult, but I try to force myself to turn the other cheek, otherwise I might as well give up.

Could you tell us a bit about your latest novel? What inspired you to write An Italian Affair?

When I bought my house deep in the heart of the Italian countryside, I was touched by the magic of its rich and diverse history. It inflamed my inspiration and made me long to capture some of the adventures and struggles my new friend’s families had experienced first-hand during the 2nd World War. It didn’t need much encouragement for them to tell their incredible stories.

If I hadn’t learnt Italian (admittedly to a very poor standard) they would never have imparted these small private gems, and I am eternally grateful to have learnt about the ghosts from the past and the people who inhabited the house and roamed the hills around me. I decided very early on that my new novel should encompass both England and Italy and be about a family divided by war. I went a step further, my hero would be a spitfire pilot involved in the struggle to protect his country in the skies above Britain in 1940.

This needed knowledge of which I had little, so I embarked upon a quest to find the best people to help me. I was so incredibly fortunate, Gerry Tyack the owner of Wellington Aviation this incredible little museum in Moreton in Marsh had been an engineer in Bomber Command during the war. He so generously gave up his time to help me, along with a great RAF friend of his Group Captain Iain Panton who was a pilot in many of the conflicts following the war. Between them they checked my manuscript, gave me books to read and taught me more than I could have dreamed possible. Every fortnight I would present them with another draft, and I was sent away with more books to read and more homework to write. What a privilege to have had these two wonderful men helping me.

What would be your 6-word memoir?

Passionate, vulnerable, honest with a large imagination.

What is the best writing advice you’ve ever had, and the worst?

The best writing advice has been to cut out anything superfluous. If words are not needed don’t use them. Let the reader work a little.

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. Ernest Hemingway.

The worst advice must have been to continue with a novel when I knew it wasn’t going anywhere. I wasted six months before trusting my own judgement.

What is your writing process like? Are you a pantser or a plotter?

This is a difficult one to answer, because the story will be in my head, but it changes daily, and at some gloriously liberating stage, the story takes over and it has a life of its own. So yes in part I am a plotter but a changeable plotter!!

Do you need a special place to write?

Sometimes I like to be amongst people because it can be very lonely locking yourself away for nine months, so I write in the kitchen. At other times, my characters keep me company and I go into my office and write on my own.

Are you part of a writing community or a writing group?

I have recently joined the RNA the Romantic Novelists Association and they are wonderful and supportive. I also have a little closed group of three friends. We meet monthly and it is incredible. We support each other, push each other on through our traumas and we are the best of friends.

What is your experience with social media as a writer? Do you find it distracts you or does it provide inspiration?

I am trying incredibly hard to be good at it, because I realise how incredibly important it is today.

Who are your favorite authors?

Isabel Allende, Charlotte Bronte, Iris Origo, Irene Nemirovsky, Sarah Waters and Ian Mcewan. Mainly women!!!!

What are you reading currently?

Sally Rooney Normal People. It is a page turner, the characters so beautifully drawn.

What are you working on at the moment?

The Promise, the second part of my book deal with Orion.

Thank you so much for your answers!

Thank you Barbara, it has been a privilege to have been asked.

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Follow Caroline on Twitter @CMontagueAuthor

 

AN ITALIAN AFFAIR

Love. War. Family. Betrayal.

Italy, 1937. Alessandra Durante is grieving the loss of her husband when she discovers she has inherited her ancestral family seat, Villa Durante, deep in the Tuscan Hills. Longing for a new start, she moves from her home in London to Italy with her daughter Diana and sets about rebuilding her life.

Under the threat of war, Alessandra’s house becomes first a home and then a shelter to all those who need it. Then Davide, a young man who is hiding the truth about who he is, arrives, and Diana starts to find her heart going where her head knows it must not.

Back home in Britain as war breaks out, Alessandra’s son Robert, signs up to be a pilot, determined to play his part in freeing Italy from the grip of Fascism. His bravery marks him out as an asset to the Allies, and soon he is being sent deep undercover and further into danger than ever before.

As war rages, the Durante family will love and lose, but will they survive the war…?

 

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, Interviews, On Writing