The Bookshop Podcast
The Bookshop Podcast
From Advertising to Italy: Pinch Me, by Barbara Boyle
In this episode, I chat with Barbara Boyle about her memoir, Pinch Me.
After decades crafting commercials and campaigns for global giants like Procter & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson, Barbara was drawn to a completely different path. Her story begins with a magical honeymoon visit to the Piedmont region of Italy, where, gazing over terracotta rooftops with morning coffee in hand, she felt an undeniable pull: "I need to live here." That feeling—equal parts recognition and revelation—set in motion a complete life transformation.
With warmth and candor, Barbara shares the unexpected parallels between her advertising background and memoir writing, where economy of language proved invaluable. She brings us along as she and her husband purchase and renovate their dream home, describing with reverence how the centuries-old stones seem to whisper stories of previous generations. "This house has an anima, a soul," their builder told them—a sentiment that perfectly captures the profound connection Barbara feels to her adopted homeland.
But this isn't simply a rose-colored relocation story. Just as Barbara was settling into her idyllic Italian life, a breast cancer diagnosis forced the couple to temporarily return to California for treatment. Her clear-eyed perspective on facing mortality while pursuing dreams adds remarkable depth to her narrative: "It is odd when all of your worst fears become real. It is not so bad." This resilience—facing challenges with grace while never losing sight of what matters—makes her story universally resonant.
Ready to be transported to the rolling hills of Piedmont? Listen now and discover how home isn't necessarily where we begin but where our soul recognizes itself—sometimes in the most unexpected places. If you enjoy Barbara's story, please share it with others who might be dreaming of their own bold life changes.
Dancing on my Own Two Feet, Jenn Todling
Hi, my name is Mandy Jackson-Beverly and I'm a bibliophile. Welcome to the Bookshop Podcast. Each week, I present interviews with authors, independent bookshop owners and booksellers from around the globe and publishing professionals. To help the show reach more people, please share episodes with friends and family and on social media, and remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. You're listening to episode 302. Barbara Boyle served for decades as an award-winning global creative director and executive vice president at Suchy and Suchy Gray and Low Advertising, creating commercials, ads and stories for Procter Gamble, johnson Johnson and Anheuser-Busch, among dozens of other worldwide marketeers. A lifelong food and wine aficionado, she is a graduate of a professional cooking course at the Institute of Culinary Education in New York. Her fiction has also been published in Flash Fiction, sky Island Journal, star 82, and Aerial Chart. Barbara has lived in Paris, frankfurt and New New York and now resides in Piedmont, italy, as well as San Francisco, california. Hi, barbara, and welcome to the show. It is a pleasure having you here, all the way from Italy.
Speaker 2:Thank you, mandy, it is really lovely to be here, Really nice.
Speaker 1:I thoroughly enjoyed your book Pinch Me. It's like every woman's dream. I think about moving and living in Italy, which is such a beautiful country. But before we get into the book, let's begin with learning about you and your work as a creative director at Saatchi, saatchi, gray, lowe and other advertising agencies, and how this work laid the foundation for writing a memoir.
Speaker 2:That's a great question. I sort of see it the other way around, which is I've always been a writer, since school. I loved to write it. I thought it was fun, and not until I graduated from college did I really think about what I'd have to do for a living. And I heard you could actually get paid being a writer. I't believe it, like they pay you to do that. And so I got a job at a small publishing company in the advertising department um, but just couldn't wait to write even little ads for the you know educational books we were working on. And then I put together a little portfolio, went up to San Francisco, worked for Chiat Day, which was, you know, becoming Chiat Day at that time, and after 10 years in San Francisco, I said I've got to try this New York thing. And moved all the way to New York but ended up in Times Square not Madison Avenue, because that's my luck. But it was a great time and a good little agency, lots of fun, and it was not so little actually, but it was a big, crazy agency, but always as a writer, and then became a creative director, and then even as a global creative director.
Speaker 2:At my heart I thought of myself as a writer. First, I'm really bad at art, other than I can appreciate it and I know good stuff when I see it, but I can't do it. So I would judge or work with teams of writers and art directors that's how it works, but I was always the writer in that team. So when I retired finally, after just being really spent and given it all in advertising, I still felt the need to keep writing, of course. So I started a blog in 2015 while we were here, about just little snippets of our life.
Speaker 2:And that's when people were blogging still and all my friends are like this is so great, your life is like this, it's really unique, because you don't have to be a very good writer to talk about what happens in Italy and make it interesting, because it's so charming and it's so beautiful and the food is so delicious. So I got a nice little following from that and I decided you know, maybe this will be my chance to write a book. I started like three screenplays over the years and never could finish one. Just life takes over. But I had nothing else to do but write and live. So that's what I started in 2015 and that eventually became Pinch Me. So it became the book of what am I? Alice in Wonderland. This is crazy, but that's the whole idea.
Speaker 1:So Alice in Wonderland, indeed, for our listeners, when you are a creative director, when you're writing commercials for video or for magazine placement, you must be succinct in your words, because you have seconds to say what you want to say. So every single word, every breath is important and every word must be necessary. So there is a gosh, a definite skill to this, and I think it's probably a good thing to have learned that skill and transitioned then over to memoir writing, because you still want to be careful of the amount of words that you put into each sentence. So, as a creative director, you understand the use of words and when not to use words. What are your thoughts on this?
Speaker 2:Well, they say I would have written a shorter letter if I had more time. A famous author or president said that, and it's true that brevity is hard at times to just make it pithy. I was doing flash fiction as I was sort of warming up for the book, and that's really a wild kind of writing. I love it. You try and keep it 250 words or less and you just keep paring back and paring back and you start at the most dramatic part and you leave out everything you don't need. And I love that this book is not a long book because of that.
Speaker 2:It is sort of if not, yet it's pretty condensed into, you know, five years that I cover because I guess I'm just used to thinking in 30 second segments. You know the other thing that you're right to point out the difference in writing for advertising is you are told what you're writing about and you are told who you're talking to and you are given the salient point that needs to be communicated. Talking to, and you are given the salient point that needs to be communicated. So it's kind of fun for me to go yeah, maybe I'll talk about cheese or talk about wine and it was really fun to have that freedom to write about things that meant to me. I enjoyed it.
Speaker 1:While I was researching, I went back and read a lot of your flash fiction and it was really fun. I'd love to see some of the original drafts of flash fiction pieces, because it's just like you said everything drops away all the superfluous words. You're left with this concise piece of writing. Barbara, could you tell us about when you lived in Paris and what inspired you to take cooking courses? And was it your decision to add the recipes in your memoir? Pinch Me, I just love them. I think it's a real added bonus to the book.
Speaker 2:Thank you. There's only 14 of them and one of them is my mother's pecan pie, but mostly they're. They spring from the stories themselves and they're mostly Italian, because it's hard to talk about Italy, and this region in particular, without food being a big part of the topic of the day. That year in Paris was interesting. I believe it was 92. I was there for work. I was given the job of trying to smooth out the agency creative product on Mars Product, not the planet, and I was sent from New York, from gray New York, to gray Paris, to see if I could get them working together with the client more smoothly, because the French were being very French and Mars is a very straightforward kind of company. So that was an interesting year.
Speaker 2:And of course, you know you're in Paris and the food is fabulous there too and I've always loved cooking and food. It's been a real. I don't like the word foodie, but it's been a passion. You know you're in Paris and the food is fabulous there too and I've always loved cooking and food. It's been a real. I don't like the word foodie, but it's been a passion you know to enjoy. I enjoy cooking, I enjoy doing things for people and presenting them and learning how to do them.
Speaker 2:And that year there I was just so impressed with the various restaurants and the cuisine. I thought, you know, I'd really like to do something deeper and you'd always heard about Le Cordon Bleu was like the ultimate thing. So I just signed up for a one week course the regional cooking but it was full time. It was from nine in the morning till 10 at night. I'd go at eight at night. I'd come home exhausted and we'd made cocoa van and puff pastry and, you know, baked and cooked and it was really interesting.
Speaker 2:And after that week I realized how much I didn't know and what I needed to learn and I got really motivated to maybe take a real course. So I went back to New York and signed up for Peter Kumpf's cooking school. Then it's become the New York Culinary Institute or something. It's changed its name, but it was seven, eight months of three nights a week and this was my full-time job. I'd leave work at five and then go work until 11, three nights a week. But it was great fun and I learned so much and at the end we put on a dinner for 70 people at the James Beard house. That was really the highlight of that time in my advertising career, although it had nothing to do with advertising but but in advertising. Every time I could I would work on a food account, you know, like Mars Snickers or Crisco Oil or Red Lobster.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about the behind the scenes, just for a moment, of the making of commercial video. As a stylist and costume designer, I've seen what it takes to get the wardrobe correct and what is wanted by the director and the team of the advertising agency for each individual actor in the commercials. For example, you might be asked for a red T-shirt. However, you know that you have to bring at least a dozen tones of red t-shirts for the fittings, which are done prior to the shoot date, because you cannot wait to the last minute. You must have everyone agree upon the shade of red t-shirt.
Speaker 2:In a dozen sizes.
Speaker 1:Yes, in different sizes. I can't tell you the amount of times that I would actually just get white t-shirts and dye them in dye lots to different shades. But in truth every commercial we see takes months to develop from the original concept to the writing at the agency and then moving on to the production company where all of the different teams involved come in and everyone has their say. In reading your book, I appreciated how you wrote about how the body physically and emotionally changes at times. When we, for example, step off a plane and put our feet on the land of a different country or a different state, something shifts in our body. So can you share the story of how you discovered Rodino and Montforte and how your body felt when you first visited the area?
Speaker 2:That's interesting. The very first time I was very nervous because I didn't. I realized in the hour between Southern France or the several-hour drive between, I guess, burgundy over to northern Italy that I hadn't really done my research. I wasn't really sure where we were going. I thought maybe it was the Lake District, which it isn't. Turns out it's the hill towns of northern Italy that you hadn't heard about.
Speaker 2:And as we're getting closer and closer, it was like the weather we had last week here, which was gray and foggy and kind of drizzly and snowy in the mountains, and I'm like, oh boy, this is our honeymoon, is this going to be just a terrible week? I was getting very nervous and it was windy and kind of dreary. But as soon as I got out of the car at the top of the hill in this beautiful little Alberigo and this lovely woman greeting us, I'm like, okay, we're going to be good. I felt very, very peaceful. And that night we had this amazing dinner that I still can't believe how it all happened. The woman from the hotel closed up the hotel, drove us down to the restaurant I mean, who does that? And at the end of the night the owner of the restaurant put us in our car and drove us back up to the restaurant I mean, who does that? And at the end of the night the owner of the restaurant put us in our car and drove us back up to the hotel. It's like you were at your mother's cousin's house or something. It was amazing and the food was so good.
Speaker 2:And the next morning the sun was bright and the sky was blue and there was snow everywhere and I really did feel like Alice in Wonderland, falling through the looking glass, just saying where am I? Am I dreaming? Is this real? Is this not real? There's so many moments that whole week that were just beautiful, just beautiful, and that body felt, um, like it belonged. There was a literal I think I talked about it in the book pretty early on having breakfast in the little breakfast room, having my little coffee and looking out over this beautiful valley, these little terracotta homes in the distance, and I just had this incredible pull to be there in those homes drinking coffee and having a morning like this every morning, which is what I have now. It really is that and, lest I forget and get caught up in life and doctor's appointments and hectic stuff, it is still a pinch me moment every morning when I wake up and go. This is my home. This is amazing.
Speaker 1:You know the way I explain that feeling is that moment when you've been on the way a long time and you come home and you open your front door and you go ah, I'm home, and it's that same experience.
Speaker 2:I think when people are traveling, often you'll say you know I could live here, and that just kept dawning on me. The very first time I landed in Rome was about 10 years earlier, and when the plane landed I felt like I was home. I felt like I was in California, but it was Italy. I really loved that first taste of Rome years ago. The night we actually came up here, though, I was nervous that it wasn't going to be nice, and as the days dawned, not only I could live here within a couple of days, I need to live here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I felt that a few times, one of them specifically being here in Ojai and the other one being in Florence. Barbara, you've spoken a little bit about your diary notes that you made and you were blogging once you arrived in Italy, going through the motions of designing the house or redesigning the house, but was there a specific moment or a time that you remember where you thought I need to write this as a memoir?
Speaker 2:You know it was 2015,. As we were making the transition from wouldn't this be a fun project to boy. This is really going to be a great house to. I don't really ever want to leave this house. I want this to be my house.
Speaker 2:That was a kind of that whole process and I'm writing the little notes and beginning to meet friends and beginning to feel a part of the community and thinking this community was so comforting and welcoming and supportive and all that thinking this is a place I could thrive, I mean really the rest of my days. And as that all kind of hung together, I started thinking this, this actually could be a book with, with some various steps of what it started to be and what it's getting to be. So it was in 2015 or so and it continued to be kind of dribs and drabs here, dribs and drabs there. You know, sometimes I take a week and write a lot, depending if my life opened up that I could do that, because you know life takes over. You have to also between writing and life. It's you got to work that balance.
Speaker 2:But there was a couple weeks where my husband was back at UCLA taking care of his brother who was being sick. He's okay now and I checked into a little B&B here in town and just wrote all day and that was actually pretty cool to really focus. And then it was definitely a book and I could see the beginning and the end, although I wasn't always sure how it was going to end. But then as the years were developing and we were settling in and I was sort of I was doing an homage to a year in Provence where I had written the year of January actually March to March and right after that time I was diagnosed with cancer, with breast cancer, and that was a huge shock. Just because this is how weird I am, I thought well, at least now I have an ending to the book, which is kind of funny, but kind of like okay, well, either way, however it ends, this is a story worth telling.
Speaker 2:That you have your dream life, it's all perfect, and then, whoa not so fast the rug gets pulled out from underneath you, and that's how it ended for Barbara. Luckily it didn't. I was really fortunate, but we had to pull up roots and move back to California for a year.
Speaker 1:And how was that for you? How did you feel about moving back?
Speaker 2:It was strange in that you really think you're scared but you have a job to do. Okay, you need to get a doctor, you need to get a place to stay. You need to go to chem Okay, you need to get a doctor, you need to get a place to stay, you need to go to chemo. You need to do certain and you just start taking it like you took it like a job. I had been retired for a couple years and I felt like this is my job again. So I kept the clear on the wall and crossed off every day. And you do it a step at a time.
Speaker 1:There's a part in your book that I'd like to read. It's a paragraph, and I think it explains everything you went through beautifully. Quote it is odd when all of your worst fears become real. It is not so bad. Nothing hurt, nothing felt different, but I knew that suddenly everything was different. So I settled in and tried to untangle the rush of my thoughts. End quote. I love those words. They were so touching for me. I feel that when we're in this predicament, it's almost calming to be given these steps you have to follow, and that is your job. Basically, as you said, you must follow every step precisely, and it brings a sense of calm. It's strange, isn't it?
Speaker 2:Well, it's like, okay, this is your worst fear. All right, my arms are attached, my legs are attached. I'm sitting in the seat of the airplane next to my husband. He put his hand in mine. I cried a little bit and then went okay, what do we do? And it isn't these things you think it's going to be, you know, but it's. It's still nothing pleasant. It's a year that's very difficult and for a lot of people, a lot longer, a lot of people a lot less. But this was, it was a very hard year and you know I've had to be careful for the last seven years, but I've been deemed cured. So it's hard for me not to feel really lucky and feel like it's a bullet past your head. You know it's a warning shot and mortal, that's okay, but you just want to. You want to handle it with grace and strength and do the best you can to get through it.
Speaker 1:When you received the diagnosis, you were living in the house in Italy. Right, you were settled there.
Speaker 2:We were. It had been like into our second year where we decided we're really going to pull up everything, rent our house I mean, sell our house and our little condo in San Francisco, move here full time why not? We just loved it and my husband had had a small hernia or something, so we would add some. You know, dealings with the medical community and it can be wonderful. But when I got the diagnosis and it took so long for them to figure it out and they kind of misdiagnosed it, and also when I'm really stressed my Italian just goes out, my brain just isn't there. So I thought I'm going to be pretty tired this year. I don't want to be dealing with saying all these subtle things in Italian. We need to get home and get to our doctors.
Speaker 2:So we just sort of made a plan, you know, took some thinking. Do you go to New York? Do you go back to San Francisco, where you know? Do you go to Sloan County? Do you go to someplace in Texas, who knows? We made the plan Again. It's like planning a vacation, but in reverse. You know you're planning how to get out of here and live for a year or two like a job.
Speaker 1:And thank heavens, financially you were able to do this, because I think that's so scary. You know you get through the emotional upheaval of your diagnosis. Then comes the ongoing months and, as you said, a year of treatment, but you have constant concerns about the financial realities of the costs and it's scary.
Speaker 2:No, the practicalities of it, and financially we took a big hit. We had sold our house, so we had to go back and rent for a year.
Speaker 1:In San Francisco, which has high rental prices.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right, to our old apartment or to the same complex of our old apartment, but and we didn't have the time to figure out well, we can clean up the house and rent this out for a year while we're gone. We just packed up and left, but people do that all the time. People recover. That's what your savings is for. We don't have it in money, but we had money put aside for something like this.
Speaker 1:Barbara, just then you mentioned the word going back home. When you think about home now, where is it?
Speaker 2:Interesting. I say home because it's where we were born and lived lives. So that is home. America will always be home, especially San Francisco and California New York used to be. It isn't really I wouldn't say home for it, but certainly the Bay Area, san Francisco. But this is our home right now too. So I feel sort of dual, that I'm a little bit of both. They're both home definitely.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I find this subject fascinating because I've lived away from Australia now way longer than I lived there before I left, and yet I always think of Australia as my home because that's where I was born. But the older I get, I think I'm finding home within, deep within my soul. What and where home is is something that I have difficulty explaining.
Speaker 2:And I think it does change throughout your life. Home will always be where I grew up, more so than any place else in America, where I grew up more so than any place else in America. The point about home with San Francisco is now that I'm healed. We were full-time back in Italy and not needing to have a place, but we thought in the last year wouldn't it be good to have one, just a stepping stone, in case we do ever need to get back and not make it a big kind of a rat race trying to get a place to live? So we have an apartment back in San Francisco again as of last June and it's great, but it doesn't feel like home, whereas this is our home. It's a great place to be in. San Francisco is home, is comfortable, but the actual apartment is so different from this, which was built by our own hands and our imagination and all that. So this is this house, is our home that way, but San Francisco will always be where I started.
Speaker 1:That's kind of a good segue into my next question. The start of chapter five begins, quote the drive up the curving road to Monforte was at once familiar yet new. End quote as we spoke of earlier, there are times in our lives when we experience this recognition, whether they be land, people, animals or buildings, and we kind of wonder what that means. Tell us about the emotions and familiar feelings this region of Italy raised in you, and what made you take notice.
Speaker 2:What's interesting is, the things that give me the most satisfaction are things that hearken back to when I was eight and seven the way we're growing vegetables and bringing them in the house and they're covered with dirt and you got to wash them off. Or the way we still take sheets and put them up on a line with clothespins and let the wind go through them. And I remember my mother doing that on her tiptoes in their backyard in California, hanging up the sheets, doing things more by hand, working in the yard, you know, mopping my own floor, kind of letting my fingernails go. I might go six months without a manicure.
Speaker 2:That is not New York, that is not advertising, but it reminds me of when I was a little girl in many ways and the simplicity of how and when I grew up. You know which was with Easter. Holidays were very simple and innocent and, you know, kind of goofy, and I have those same feelings here. There's a lot of it Christmas too, a lot of those feelings come back where I feel very close to my parents who are gone and that the parents and the childhood that I had when we were a family. So it's a very comforting feeling. That's familiar.
Speaker 1:Everything you've just said reflects back to that word home, doesn't it?
Speaker 2:You dug deep in me to get that one, Mandy. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you for going there. You spoke about the memories that tug at our soul and likewise, one of my memories is about hanging clothes on the line. It's very warm here in Ojai, so when we can, we use the clothesline outside to hang out our clothes to dry. And every time I see the clothesline or the pegs, I have this memory of my mother, in her dress, going out with the basket and hanging clothes on the line. Perfectly, I feel the wind rustling through the clothes. It's so ingrained in my soul.
Speaker 2:No, and the little wooden clothespins and the smell of the tide and the Clorox. I mean, I've worked on tide. We talked a lot about that smell. It reminds me of my mother. The smell of the clean sheets and the sunshine and the fresh air in them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they definitely take us back to our childhood moments. Can you share the moment when you and your husband Kim decided to take the step and purchase a place in Italy and make it your home, in particular, the reason you went and saw this last home?
Speaker 2:You know, we had dated 11 years before we got married. So we take our time doing things and the whole time we dated, my husband, who was in real estate development on his own, would say, well, we could maybe live here. And so we would always look at different places, always with an eye to we could live here, we could live there. But I was taking it pretty seriously here in Italy because I really had that pull, that I, but I want to live like in this town here. So when we came back a second time, we're really looking at the homes. They were all beautiful and they were all interesting and you could, you know, make the old fixer-upper dream come true with them, because they're these old, stone, crumbling, falling down structures. But somehow and we were going to get on a plane like a day later we come to this house, we come down the driveway and pull around and the whole setting was unbelievable. It was late afternoon and you could hear the birds and the sun was coming in. It was so quiet and I looked around and I kind of nudged my husband on the arm. I said this is it and he goes barbara, how do you know? This is it? We haven't even gotten out of the car yet. I said I, I just know it. It's like well, let's go take a look around. What are you talking about, right? So he gets out and starts tramping around the house and I go and sit down on the little corner over there and I just sat there for the longest time going. I could stay here the rest of my life. This is absolutely it.
Speaker 2:And by the time he came back, after kind of roaming around the old barn and house, he said okay, this is it too. We just, you know, within an hour or two, we just felt it, and our neighbors who were selling the house are kind of our age, roughly our age had they didn't know a word of English, but they were so sweet and, um, she had gone into her garden and pulled up this little uh, not stamen but pistils, I guess of saffron, and put him in my hand and she goes saffrono and I went saffron and I realized Milan is not far. Of course they have saffron, rice and risotto milanese is that beautiful golden color? And I just thought, boy, these would be nice neighbors, wouldn't it be fun to have them next door, pretty next door, not far away? And they have been. They were a big part of what we loved about the home there. They have all that charm and welcoming and sweetness that the Italians have, but kind of on steroids, I mean they're just the nicest neighbors.
Speaker 1:And then you ended up renting a little place from them, right within their home.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we moved in. We moved in for about a year and a half while we were finishing up the barn. This really was a 300-year-old stone barn and we could just run back and forth from their house over to the work site and we could sort of practice our English, Italian, however we talked. I'm not quite sure how we communicated, but we did and it was great. And they rented it for a ridiculously cheap price. I think it was $100, 100 euros a week for us to stay there, which made it workable for us to be able to come here.
Speaker 1:Speaking of the stones, I'm looking at the wall behind you and there seems to be a mix of stones and brick. I'm guessing it pertains to the different eras of the house, when it was remodeled. Is that right?
Speaker 2:You know, over 300 years, different things happen at different times. This particular wall is bricks and stones, terracotta tiles, all that kind of built into it, but this was a wall that had been standing. This is all the barn, this is all where the animals lived. Our living room is where the animals lived and then up our guest bedrooms are where the owner lived, the woman who was born here and died here 98 years later. He lived up there and that's again 300-year-old walls that go up way high and you know they tell stories, those stones. You can just imagine with the men what they were doing, what was going on in their life. Was there a war going on? Were there terrible dictators going on? You know a lot of respect. They've endured a lot.
Speaker 1:I believe when we go to these old buildings to visit, if you sit quietly you can hear the whispers of some of the history throughout the land that the building is built upon and also in the woodwork or the stonework, and I think there's some kind of inherited suffering there. Maybe some of these buildings have souls.
Speaker 2:That's funny. Our builder said this house has an anima, a soul. He really felt that. You know, you were just a keeper of the house for a while. I mean, I'm kind of aware that we're here and it's not going anywhere anytime soon. So we sort of hope that when we're not here our kids will still keep it in the family and come here and maybe feel close to us, and then maybe their kids, who knows? I have such respect for the people who have spent 300 years eating raising wheat for flour that they would then make pasta, raising goats to make goat cheese. I mean, I mean their little vegetable gardens. They'd survive on this land, you know, amazing.
Speaker 1:The culture there is so different than the culture here, where in America if a house is from the 30s or the 40s it tends to be torn down and rebuilt into some mega house. We forget about the souls of the building and I think when, maybe perhaps one day, that's something you'll write about the soul of the house.
Speaker 2:I want to focus on the woman who lived here. She was born here, died here 98 years later and never married, never left, took care of her brother the last years of her life. And I her name was Emma and I really want to get to know her. And I'll just make up all kinds of stuff, I'm sure, but I want to know what was going on in the world around her.
Speaker 1:And how it affected her. I think that's a fabulous idea. Now you are published with she Writes Press, which is a hybrid publisher. What drew you to this form of publishing and to she Writes Press?
Speaker 2:Well, I knew it would be a struggle to get an agent. So I think I sent out one letter as an agent and it just faded away and I had an editor I was working with that I had found through a friend in New York and she said you know, there are hybrid publishers. She goes, she writes as one of the most highly respected and continues to be getting stronger. They're distributed by Simon and Schuster. They charge you a little bit of money but it's not incredible. You look at what the big publishers charge or what they spend on. A book can be $100,000. And you have to be very proactive. You have to bring your friends and you know your Facebook friends and all that to the party. But I feel like it was a very good value.
Speaker 2:You know you get to be involved in the cover and in what the book looks like. You have to edit it yourself. You are the final approval. You don't just hand a rough manuscript over to somebody who changes it and switches around the title and does all that. You have a lot of control and I like that. You know I was a always part of a creative team where you definitely got to vote. You know I would sort of. I mean, honestly, if I got a call from a publisher who said we'll take it, we'll market it, it would be interesting, it would be fun, but I don't think that's going to happen. You know, you'd have to be young younger. Usually you have to be already pretty famous, which I'm not younger. Usually you have to be already pretty famous, which I'm not.
Speaker 1:I have a lot of respect for what Brooke Warner is doing with she Writes Press. I met her years ago at an IBPA function, maybe in Austin, when she was involved with that company and I've had a few authors who publish with she Writes Press on the show and I've been impressed.
Speaker 2:The authors that I've met. We have a cohort I like because it's only women, so you're already. 50% of the people aren't going to be competing with you.
Speaker 2:You're only going to have women, you know, and they were very selective. They don't just take anybody, which is nice, and they were very excited about my first manuscript. And the authors that I've met are really fabulous people, really smart, they have a story to tell and some of them are story to tell and they're all. Some of them are quite amazing writers and they're all solid, good writers. You know, some are very, very good and the books are beautiful. If you look at them one after another, you can go yes, add a good quality to it.
Speaker 1:So, and it's fabulous that she now has distribution through Simon Schuster. Okay, let's talk about books. What are you currently reading?
Speaker 2:Simon Schuster. Okay, let's talk about books. What are you currently reading? I'm currently reading the Breaks, which is another one of my authors, and it's really fun. It's about a life in Kansas City. She lives in Los Altos now, which is where I grew up, but she grew up in Kansas City and she makes it. It's in present day, but it's really real, very charming, very interesting. She's a good writer and I've just gotten the manuscript for Jen Toddling's book, which is called Dancing on my Own Two Feet, and I haven't read that yet. But I just wanted to look at her manuscript because it's nice to review it. I want to read it before I get the book. It's hard to get books here in Italy, so I've read A Bear I read last year. I enjoyed that. I like reading memoirs.
Speaker 1:Is there an independent bookshop in the area where you live?
Speaker 2:No, well, not here in Italy. What I do have are some really lovely townspeople that the mayor in Monforte just suggested we could maybe do a sort of a cooperative event with this painter that has sort of become the Monforte painter and they take over the old Old Town church and do his kind of demonstrate his art show and they invite people in and give you a champagne and he sells his work or not, depending and so it's kind of like a three, four or five day event where you go spend a few hours there and meet people and show them your book. So maybe I'll try and sell it that way. But people here are really excited about it because they go. I'm in the book. Oh my gosh, that's so exciting. So I kind of can't keep it around. I had like 20, 30 books when we arrived three weeks ago and I'm down to one. So people either buy them or can I take them, you know.
Speaker 1:That's wonderful. Well, italy does have some great indie bookshops. I've had a few of them on the show. But I did notice too that some of the publishing companies in Italy open their own bookshops, which is interesting because we don't have that concept here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'll have to investigate that. There's a stop by Three in Alba, which is sort of our big city. It has 20,000 people, so that's the big city, and the three bookstores just kind of loved him and want to take them. But I don't have enough. One is suspicious that he can't do it because it's not published in Italy. So I'm looking into how would I do that. I've been talking to a couple of publishers. I think we're probably not going to translate it to Italian because it's written very. It is so colloquial that it would be kind of tricky. Plus, it is so colloquial that it would be kind of tricky. Plus, they're not so amazed that it's a 300-year-old Italian farmhouse because they know what, that it's really good pasta. They just for them. It's natural. It's normal we're amazed at it, you know.
Speaker 1:Barbara, it's been great chatting with you. I'm green with envy for where you live, although I do love where I live too, in Ojai but there's something about the history and the culture of Italy that is somehow snuck into my heart. Thank you for writing your memoir Pinch Me. It was lovely to hear about the story of your relocation from San Francisco to Italy. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Thank you, mandy, it's been a pleasure. I'll come see you next time I'm in Santa Barbara.
Speaker 1:I'll head over to Ojai podcast. To find out more about the bookshop podcast, go to thebookshoppodcastcom and make sure to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to the show. You can also follow me at Mandy Jackson Beverly on Instagram and Facebook and on YouTube at the bookshop podcast. If you have a favorite indie bookshop that you'd like to suggest we have on the podcast, I'd love to hear from you via the contact form at thebookshoppodcastcom. The Bookshop Podcast is written and produced by me, Mandy Jackson-Beverly, Theme music provided by Brian Beverly, and my executive assistant and graphic designer is Adrian Otterhahn. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time.