The Bookshop Podcast
The Bookshop Podcast
Mary Morris On Maternal Mystery, War Shadows, And Artful Truths
In this episode, I chat with Mary Morris about her latest novel, The Red House.
A lost button at an airport. A plaque on a modest olive tree. A red monolith on a hill that once held people in limbo. My conversation with Mary Morris reveals how these small, stubborn details evolved into The Red House, a propulsive and intimate novel about a daughter following her missing mother’s trail across Italy and through the overlooked corners of World War II history.
Mary shares how speaking Italian—and loving languages—let her move beyond postcards and step inside local memory, building the kind of empathy that makes fiction feel true.
The heart of this episode beats with maternal absence and creative courage. Mary reflects on the teacher who named her a writer, the dream that pushed her to New York, and the decision to return to the sheer pleasure of story over market expectations. We chat about the joy of reading books translated into English, reading for texture, and why art—visual, poetic, and narrative—can hold what direct speech cannot. If you’re drawn to literary fiction, historical mystery, Italian settings, WWII history in southern Italy, and novels that braid love, loss, and identity, you’ll feel at home here.
If this conversation resonates, follow the show, share it with a friend who loves books, and leave a quick review—your notes help more curious readers find us.
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 312. Hi, and before we get started, I would like to thank FeedSpot for voting the Bookshop Podcast as the number one in the 20-top bibliophile podcast for 2025. That's two years running. Thank you, FeetSpot. We appreciate it. Okay, now let's get on with this week's episode. Mary Morris is the author of numerous works of fiction, including the novels The Waiting Game, Gateway to the Moon, The Jazz Palace, A Mother's Love, and House Arrest, and of non-fiction, including the travel memoir Nothing to Declare, Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature and the 2016 Annis Field Wolf Award for Fiction. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Mary's latest novel is titled The Red House. And here's the synopsis. She left behind her purse, her keys, and her mysterious paintings of a red house. Viola was never found, and her family never recovered. Laura, an artist herself, held on to the paintings. On the back of each work, her mother scrawled in Italian, I will not be here forever. The family never understood what Viola meant. Decades later, at a crossroads in her marriage and her life, Laura returns to Italy, where her parents met after World War II. Laura spent the earliest years of her childhood there before the family moved to New Jersey and settled into an American dream that eventually became a nightmare. Viola, who claimed to be an orphan, staunchly refused to speak of her life before marriage. In Italy, Laura finds herself on a strange scavenger hunt to solve the puzzle of her mother's lost years. She is certain that the paintings of the Red House hold the answer to her mother's past, and her search takes her from her hometown in Brindisi deep into Puglia, where she encounters a man who knew her mother and who illuminates little-known secrets of Italy's Second World War. Blending elements of true crime with settings that evoke Elena Ferrante, Laura follows her mother's trajectory as she ventures north to Naples, Turin, and finally home. Along the way, she confronts the dark truth of her mother's story and at last makes sense of her own. Hi Mary and welcome to the show. It's great to have you here. Thank you, Mandy.
SPEAKER_00:It's lovely to be here. I really appreciate it.
SPEAKER_02:It's my pleasure, and I have to say, I absolutely loved The Red House. What a wonderful book. Anytime I read a novel of historical fiction, I end up down rabbit holes looking up facts. And the Red House was wonderful. I learned so much from reading the book. Let's begin with learning about you and your mother's love of travel. And then the first time you were told you were going to be a writer because I love that story.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, the kind of cool thing about my mother was that she was a person who loved travel, who never was able to go anywhere. She was a suburban housewife. She wanted to go everywhere. She named our first dog Renoir because she wanted a Renoir and she wanted to go to France and she loved France, but she'd never gone. So when she was 15, she actually took me with her to girl because my dad wouldn't wouldn't travel. But the story I love to tell about my mother, and it's in the my first travel memoir, Nothing to Declare, is my parents were invited to a suppressed desire ball. Now, I don't think they have suppressed desire balls anymore, but then they did. And you were to go as your secret wish. And my mother, who had a degree in fashion design from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1930, okay, she had a scholarship. She went into a kind of weird trance and she wound up, she bought home all this stuff. I didn't know what she was doing. And she went down to the basement and she had a mannequin, she started building this thing. I didn't know what it was. And I'd go down there at night and she'd say, Where should I put the Taj Mahal? Where should the Eiffel Tower go? And I was like, What do you? You know, I didn't know what she was doing. Well, anyway, the night of the ball, I was quite little, and I remember standing at the bottom of the stairs and looking up at my parents. And my father looked absolutely handsome and debonaire and striking in a tuxedo. And it seemed as if he had no costume. But in fact, his barber had given him a toupee, and he looked just like Carrie Graham. I mean, he was very, very handsome. My mother had made a costume of the world for herself. My mother became the world. And that is probably the most formative image of my mother that I will ever have. And I fell in, I fell in love with travel then. I fell in love with her longing. And um, you know, I fulfilled her dreams. And she did wind up traveling later in her life.
SPEAKER_02:So oh Mary, I love the story of your mother building this stress or making this piece of art. I used to work in fashion and as a stylist and costume designer in the film industry, and I can just see her building the stress of the world. Oh, what a beautiful image.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, it it's probably it's it's an extraordinary story for me, you know. And and she was good, you know, she really could do those. So she was very good at it.
SPEAKER_02:Making clothes is kind of a dying art, I think, for for mothers anyway. I don't know about you, but when I was younger, I got all the hand-me-downs, and most of them were uh clothes that my mother had made for my older sister. Um, she did make me a few pieces of my own, which are treasured. I still have them. But yeah, it's kind of a dying art. I I guess it's because clothing uh can be bought so cheaply now. And also we have thrift stores where people can buy clothes at affordable prices.
SPEAKER_00:My mother um she quilted um on my bedspread, she made my curtains. It took her seven. I you know, I actually think I was ready to leave for college by the time she finished quilting my bedspread. Oh my goodness. But she she really, really was very, very gifted. And I think you're right that it's it's now viewed as kind of quaint, you know what I mean? That I don't know anyone who does their own seamstressing anymore.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it's sad to think of it as being a dying art. And what about the story, one of my favorites about you, when you were a little girl and someone told you you were going to be a writer?
SPEAKER_00:Um well, there are two stories about this. One was my third grade teacher, Ms. Dorsch, who was very formative also in my life. And Ms. Dorsch, if I was writing a story, if I was writing stories, and I guess I wrote, I don't remember the writing stories when I was in third grade. But if I was writing a story, um, Miss Dorsch would let me stay in from recess to work on my story. Now I love to go out for recess. It wasn't that I didn't want to go out, but I preferred to stay in and write my stories, which is kind of true for my whole life, if you know what I mean. I'm sort of the same way. I mean, you know, I love to go out and have fun, but I also love to stay home and and and write stories. Um, so Miss Dorsch in my third grade report said to my mother, told my parents that I was going to be a writer. So that was formative one. And then, I mean, there are other formative moments, but the there's another moment when I was a graduate student at Columbia where I was writing all the time, but I didn't feel that I could show the world my work. You know, I felt like, I don't know, I just kept it to myself. And there was a woman across the hall, and she played very, very loud music. And I would occasionally knock on her door and she would scream at me. And one day I knocked at her door and I said, and she screamed at me really loud, and I thought, okay, I have to, I have to move somewhere else. So I moved somewhere else in the dorm. And then this Pakistani gentleman came up to me one day and he said to me, Um, I'm organizing poetry reading and I want you to read your poems. And I said, Well, I don't have any poems. And he said, Well, you're a graduate student in literature, you have a full fellowship. Clearly, you write poetry. And I said, I don't have any poems. So I said, Okay, I'm going to stop by your room tonight. I thought that was messed up, I didn't know what that was about. He said, I'm going to stop by your room tonight and you will show me your poems. So I literally sat on my bed while he went through a drawer. He opened the drawer, literally, and went through the poems. And he picked out three or four and he said, I want you to read these on Friday. And I said, I said, I can't. I said, No, you're you're going to read. He just didn't sit, he wouldn't leave me alone. So I thought, okay, so I got to the reading and I thought, I can do this, I can do this. And then my arch enemy, there she was, sitting across from me in the front row. And I thought, oh my God, this is like literally the worst moment of my entire life. And I managed to get through the poems and I read them. And she came up to me afterwards and she stood right in front of me and she said, if I knew that you were writing those poems, I would have kept my music down. And that was it for me. I thought, I can be in the world now. You know, we all need a guide, right? We all need somebody to help us open the door and open the drawer.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, and I love the fact that your so-called nemesis had the courage to come up to you and say the kind words that she did. I mean, how inspiring is that? It's just wonderful. Now, I've also heard you speak about a dream that you had when you had pretty much hit rock bottom uh in your twenties. Can you share that, please? Because that was kind of like a real turning point for you. And it was based around a dream. And I happen to have been journaling my dreams for decades. And I'm sure Alice Ness would love to hear this dream.
SPEAKER_00:I was really, it was actually the beginning of graduate school. I was um, you know, I've had like three dreams in my life that have been absolute I I write my dreams down too, and so I so relate to that fact that you write your dreams down. I don't really remember them anymore. I don't know what that what that's about, but we don't need to go into that. But um, you know, I wrote them down for for years and I I have all of them. The one you're talking about, I was a graduate student at Harvard. I was um living with an engaged to a Frenchman, and um I was at class one day and I was studying Dante's Inferno. I was studying Dante, I was a compliment major, and um, I was literally in the middle of the inferno, and I came home one day, and he had just moved out and left me a note and said, like, this isn't working out, and that was it. And I was like, oh my god, my life is over. I'm 23 years old, and this is horrible. And I think my bicycle had been stolen the day before, it just wasn't a really good week. Anyway, so I was really depressed, and the only thing I had going was I was taking this class in Dante's Inferno with a wonderful professor. And uh one afternoon I fell I fell asleep while reading, and I had this dream. I dreamt that I was walking down a street in Paris, and there was the cafe, a cafe. And the name on the cafe in Italian, I'll try to do it in Italian, was Lasciati Ogni Speranza Voi Centrare Cafe. It's written over the gates of hell, which means leave behind all help ye who enter here cafe. So I'm like, okay, I look in the cafe and there's Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein sipping camparian soda. And I thought, well, I want to be a writer, and obviously, this is the cafe I have to go to if I want to be. This is the writer's cafe, obviously. The leave behind all help ye who enter here cafe. So I um I go in, I order a camparian soda because that seemed to be the drink you had to order if you wanted to be a writer. And I sat down a little table, and my table fell into a deep dark hole in this in the middle of the earth with no way out, and it was only blackness around me. So I thought, okay, I'm this is it. I'm I'm done. This is again in the dream. And um all of a sudden, somehow, six pall bearers arrived with a coffin, and they left the coffin in front of me. And I knew that whatever my destiny was was in the coffin, and I had to open it. And I opened the coffin and it turned into a roll top desk with paper for eternity. And I woke up from that dream and I said, I'm gonna move to New York, I'm gonna be a writer. Um, I finished my Dante class, I wrote a letter to Columbia University, they had already accepted me. I went to Columbia, I really didn't study, as the story with my nemesis tells you that I was writing even then, and that was it.
SPEAKER_02:And I never looked back. I have a quick question about your dream. Do you remember drinking any of the Camparian soda?
SPEAKER_00:I hate Camparian soda. I have never had a Camparian soda. So no, I didn't, I I don't believe I drank it, but to this day, I literally maybe I'm afraid I'm gonna fall back into that ouviet, you know, one of those holes. No, I I it's not my drink, no.
SPEAKER_02:I think our subconscious is a powerful, powerful tool. If we listen to our dreams and if we document them and look at what's happening in our life, you know, along with the dreams, it can sometimes be as good as going to a therapist.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I think what you're saying, I think there is a way. I mean, look, I do I believe in like destiny and all of that. I mean, I do, I do in my own way, and and I and I feel there are things in my life that have shown me this there is destiny. But I also think that that some in some part of some part of us knows, some part of us knows our path if we could just listen to it, you know, and maybe that's really the goal of therapy is just learning to listen to you know what your neurons are really telling you that you you want.
SPEAKER_02:What I find interesting about aging is now I can look back and see myself from my party days, which is probably from age 14 to say 30. With a long stint, Mary. I look back and I think, oh my goodness, I wasn't listening. I wasn't listening to my body. You know, the sensations that would come to me if I met someone who maybe if I'd been listening, I'd have known that that person wasn't really good for me, or no, don't do that because it's not going to be safe. Not that I did a lot of unsafe things, but a few too many, I think. Um but the other thing I remember is sometimes I was too scared to listen. But then I woke up and thought, okay, this isn't working. I'm not really healthy right now. And I started listening to my body, uh, the little goosebumps on my arms, all the feelings in my stomach, and life gradually began to turn around. That whole part of my life felt like I was trying to get back to my original self. I was trying to learn to listen. I was trying to learn to take notice of myself, my body, and my emotions. And this for me became the ultimate lesson in understanding myself. Okay, let's get back to you. I got carried away. Sorry, that's just such an interesting topic for me. Um, you speak quite a few languages.
SPEAKER_00:I do. Well, so I, you know, again, this is, you know, my my my dear mother, with whom, again, I had a complicated relationship, but she she made me study French from the time I was eight years old. I mean, she wanted me to learn French. And then I actually fell in love with languages. And um, so I speak French, Italian, and Spanish quite fluently. And if if you put me in any of those countries for more than a week or two, I'm I'm very fluent. Um, I speak a little German, and you know, I can kind of get by in a couple other places, but um, no Portuguese. For some reason, I don't hear it. I I I've tried, I've I just don't hear Portuguese. Um, but um, you know, I tend to travel to countries where those languages are spoken, but it was really weird because we were in Copenhagen recently, and I somehow, my husband had freaked him out because I could understand Danish. Now, of course, there's a lot of German in it, but I I really could understand things around me and read menus and things like that. So, you know, I don't know. I um when I was when I was in high school, we had to take this language aptitude test, and it was in Kurdish because Kurdish has no cognates in English. Kurdish is a like one of those languages like Basque or Finnish, and they give you an hour to learn Kurdish and then they'd give you a test in the language, it was bizarre. Um, but I scored off the charts in that, and I never ever scored very well in any other testing. So I I've always had that, you know, my dad was very musical. They say music and of course, music, music, math, and language is supposed to go together, but I don't know. I also like to talk to people, you know, and I like to listen to people.
SPEAKER_02:So And that comes through in your writing. And it kind of leads me to my next question because you've lived across cultures and geographies. How has that shaped your empathy as a storyteller? And how do you see fiction as a tool for inspiring empathy?
SPEAKER_00:Well, you know, Mandy, it goes back to what you were talking about about listening and learning to listen and how you weren't listening to your own body and maybe to others. I mean, there's a couple of things that I found about living across cultures, but also to me, part of the importance of living across cultures is that you do have language. Because if you don't have language, you're just in your little enclave. You know, you may as well be in the diplomatic core, right? Nothing wrong with the diplomatic core, but you know, so for example, the the part of Italy where the Red House is set, I would not have been able to write that book had if I didn't speak very, very good Italian, and I can explain that a little later on. But you know, that you're able to enter and penetrate cultures in a different way. And in terms of storytelling, I mean, I love stories, I'm a storyteller and I love to listen to people's stories. And so I don't want to just listen to people that have the same experiences that I do. You know, I can go and listen to my friends at the you know, cafe down the road anytime I want, but you know, I want to hear about, you know, people who've had different experiences. And, you know, I think that is the path to empathy. I mean, compassion and empathy is understanding what other people experience, what other people live. If you're only experiencing who you are and what you live, you know, that's when we get into like, you know, I'm right and they're wrong. You know, we get into those conversations that are not going to make the world a better place.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I mean, I encouraged my sons to go live and travel in other countries. Uh, but one of the things I have found for me is that I've lived in Australia, the US, and UK. And even though each country speaks English as their main language, uh, man, have I learned a lot from those three different cultures. It has been fascinating. One thing about the pandemic is I think publishers realized their people were craving more books in translation. And for me, that's been wonderful because I love reading translated books. There's a certain cadence in the writing that makes you pause and explore the musicality of each word, of each sentence and paragraph. So if you aren't able to travel, reading books that are translated into English is a good way to experience another culture.
SPEAKER_00:I'm I'm always fascinated. You know, um, I'll tell you a kind of a funny story one day. Um, you know, I like to buy different translations also if I'm reading things. You know, if like if Lydia Davis comes out with a new prouse translation, I compare it to the I think it was the Moncrief translation. I can't really remember, whatever the translation before, you know. And um, we had to have some plumbing work done one day. Richie the plumber came by and we were doing the plumbing. And then we came to he came to my office to settle up and he's looking at my books and he goes, So do you prefer the fagels or the Mandelstam translation of the Odyssey? Because I, you know, I like the fagels, and we and we started talking about the translations from you know of Greek myth from Greek, you know, myths from Homer. And he like knew the, and I was like, okay, I'm first of all, A, I'm never judging a human being again by what they do or what uniform they wear ever. A. But also, like, he was really interested. I mean, he knew the differences between the translations and which ones he preferred. And and we had this, you know, and I mean translation really does make a difference. You know, one of the first jobs I ever had was at the Beacon Press in Boston, and I worked on Robert Bly's translations. I helped publish, was an editorial assistant. But he translated from all of these languages. Now, I don't know that he spoke them all, but he he turned them into poetry, you know, and that's always kind of fascinated me, also the sort of the non-literal translations.
SPEAKER_02:Good Lord, that must have taken some work. How did he get through that?
SPEAKER_00:I don't know. I really don't know.
SPEAKER_02:I guess a bit like the same way you got through that uh the exam for languages, and you were given it all in Kurdish, right?
SPEAKER_00:Yes, fortunately, it was only one hour of grammar and vocabulary. Yes.
SPEAKER_02:Um, I couldn't help but marvel at how you were guided to write the Red House. In the story, Laura searches for Viola, her mother, who went missing when Laura was a child. And Laura remembers the buttons they made to give to people in the hopes someone would recognize her. What significance did buttons and the name Viola have on your need to write the Red House?
SPEAKER_00:Almost everything I write starts from a real place, and then it just kind of twirls off into the wherever. And that began for me at the Memphis airport in 2006 when I was standing in a line. It was when TSA had just started, you know, checking. You know, you couldn't just go get on a plane anymore. I'm in a line, and something fell behind me. And um, I saw that a man had dropped something on the ground, and it was in fact a button. And I picked it up. It was a large button. I thought maybe it was a political button, or I didn't know. And on it was a woman's face, and written on it said, Have you seen this woman? And her name was Viola. And I tried to hand it back to him, and he said, No, you you can keep that. He said, I hand them out wherever I go. It's my wife, and she disappeared. And um, I searched for her. And I took that button, so I had this really crazy bullish board at home, which unfortunately this is not my home because you could see my bullish board, but you know, everything I get, a feather, I don't know, whatever it is, I put it on the bullish board because I think maybe there's a shard in it, maybe there's an idea, a little germ of a story. And um I put that button on my bullish board, and and and Viola was up there looking at me for for many years. And then when I started writing this book, and and to be honest with you, I wasn't really sure. Well, I can I'll tell you a little bit about the that in terms of the origin of it, because I I I knew the history of the Red House. I know I wanted to write about the Red House, but I didn't have quite a story for it. And I looked up and I saw Viola looking at me from the wall, and I thought, there's a mother who's gone missing. There's a missing mother, and her name is Viola, and that was that was it for me. So save those little things that you know, all those little things you find in your pockets.
SPEAKER_02:And I think it's imperative for any creative to have a bulletin board. As you said, you never know when you're gonna get a shard of an idea from something like a button. And 20 years later, I think you said, a button, a missing mother, the name Viola, and here you are having written the Red House.
SPEAKER_00:20 years later. Well, you know, my daughter kicked me out of my office, um, my original office a few years ago because she had a baby. She went and had a baby and she wanted the office. I mean, it's it's we're fine, it's good. I mean, the kids live downstairs in our house, but that was my office. And so I had to move upstairs to her old bedroom. Um, so my husband and I live upstairs and they have they have their own apartment downstairs. But anyway, um, the first thing I said to the person doing the carpentry is I said, I need, I need the board, I need a bulletin board. You gotta move my board. So that was that was the one of the first things.
SPEAKER_02:And Mary, when did you first become aware of the detention center in Alberobelo?
SPEAKER_00:You know, Mandy, what I like to say is there are stories that you choose as a writer, and there are stories that choose you. And this one chose me. So my husband and I and our daughter with our family, we did house exchanges for like 20 years, and we went all over Europe for summer vacations. And we loved it. You know, we'd swap our house with somebody in County Carey, Ireland, or you know, the south of France, or you know, we would just do these swaps. But they were a lot of work, and the daughter grew up, and I just said, I'm done, we'll figure out a different different way to travel. But as fate would have it, I got an offer from this beautiful farmhouse in Puglia in southern Italy from a family that wanted to come to New York. And I said, I I can't not, I have to do this. So we we went, we went, of course, and it was extraordinary. Um, and the other family members lived in the area, and one came to us one day and said, I want to take you to this town. I think you'll really like it. It's called Arbello Bello. Well, Arbello, I knew about Arbalo Bello. It looks like it was designed for hobbits. I mean, it's got these funny conical shapes, it really does. I mean, it's like Middle Earth, it's little conical-shaped houses. And um, it's it's really truly a fascinating place, and of course, it's one of those places that's been spoiled by mass tourism. And, you know, as a travel writer, also I knew that it was gonna be, you know, t-shirts and keychains and you know, tour guides walking around with, you know, ducks on duck umbrellas and all that. So we got to Arabelo Bello. Um, I took an instant dislike, I walked around for a little bit, and then I said to my family and to our friends, uh, I'm tired, there's a little courtyard, I'm just gonna sit and rest in the shade. So I I went and got a gelato, I'm sitting in the little courtyard, and there's a crummy little tree in the middle of the courtyard. Like it was just this nothing tree. This is where the iPhone, where the phone comes in handy. And look at the tree, and the tree's kind of wearing a plaque around it, right? It's got a plaque on it, it's almost as big as the tree. So I I got up and I looked at this plaque. This originally was in the book. I took it out because I realized I didn't want it in the book, but I like to tell it as a story. The plaque was written in two languages that I happen to be able to read. Um, one is Hebrew and the other is Italian. And it said to the people of Arabelo Bello from the people of Jerusalem, this olive tree for your kindness during the racist period. And I'm like, what could this strange town have to do with the Nazis and the you know occupation of well, I mean, they weren't occupied, they were they were Axis powers, but anyway, what could it have to do with the Jews here? So I started asking, am I going too long with the story? Because I I I feel like I'm gonna wander a little bit. Absolutely not. Please keep going. Okay, okay. So um, you know, I went to the tourist bureau and I'm asking around, and and and our friends that I was with, she was a very knowledgeable person. I said, nobody knew anything about this plaque, why it was there, what the town could have possibly had with the with the Nazi era. So I took a picture of the plaque. Thank you, iPhone, right? I forget this. It was 13 years ago, so I can't do the math right now, but whatever 13 years ago was. But I I wasn't ready to really pursue this. I just, it was kind of just interesting. I was working on other things at the time. A few years later, I think this was right after COVID or right before COVID, one or the other, maybe right before COVID. I was walking my dog, my neighbor's walking his dog. He goes, Hi, what are you doing? And I said, I'm actually leaving for Italy in three hours and I can't talk, but it's great to see you. And he starts talking me in fluent Italian. And I'm going like, and so I start talking to him in fluent Italian. So we're talking in Italian, and I've known him for 30 years. And I said, I didn't know you're Italian. He said, Well, my parents were or my family, we're Roman Jews and we're Holocaust survivors. And um, you know, my family has a really interesting story. And I said, and I remembered the plaque in the tree in southern Italy, which was he's Roman, so that's quite a bit further. It's like six hours south. I said, Do you know anything about this town and what it could possibly have with Jewish history? Because it seemed weird to me. And he said he didn't know anything about it, but he had taken a class and it had a lot to do with southern Italy, and he would send me a bunch of articles. So he sends me the articles, I download them on the flight before the flight. My husband, who annoys me so much, can sleep through, you know, he gets on a long distance flight and he just goes to sleep, and I'm like wide awake. So I'm reading through the articles, and in a footnote, it said on the outskirts of Arabello Bello was a detention center called the Red House, La Casa Rosa. So I woke Larry up and I said, We have to find it. We have to go there. And Mandy, we did find it. I mean, it he's in long suffering. It's okay, we're great. Um, we had to drive around a lot, nobody seemed to know where it was or what it was. And then we came to this monolith of a building that sits perched alone on a hill. Um, it looks like a concentration camp. Um, if you have ever seen a concentration camp, that's exactly what in fact it looks like. We went up to this building and we're walking around it, and I felt my heart just getting heavier and heavier and heavier. And on the outside of the building was a graffiti, a very large graffiti that said, Um, no setoepe sempre, I will not be here forever.
SPEAKER_02:Oh my goodness.
SPEAKER_00:And I'm like, What, you know, what is this? So when we got home next to where we were staying, always our friend's place, um, I called my friend and I said to her, Do you know about this building? And she said, I don't know the building, but I think I know someone who could help you. And anyway, long story short, she found the one person in that part of Italy in the world who had the key to the padlock to that building, La Casa Rosso, that was a detention center during the war. And I Met that gentleman and he unlocked the door and I was able to walk through this building, which very, very few people have until now, and recently it was about to be turned into a discotheque. Okay. I think that's in the novel. And somebody in the historic center of Italy said, you know, I think there's some value, historic value to this building. I don't think it should be a discotheque. You know, I think it should be something else. And this gentleman who is was is the kind of cultural proprietor of La Casa Rossa. Um, and I felt that once I'd walked in the building, um, I wasn't going to be able to walk out until I wrote about it. I mean, I just felt that that very, very strongly. Um, and may I just share with you briefly about the graffiti on the wall? Because as we were leaving the building, and there were all kinds of artifacts in the building too. There's a list of library books, and that's why the Cantamone Cristo is in the novel, because the Cantamone Cristo is one of the books that, well, the father checks it out in the novel, but it is on this list of books. You know, the Jews kept a library there. So there's a list of books they borrowed from each other, you know, and they had to return them. So I sent him as we were leaving, I said, What is the graffiti? He said, Oh, it's not graffiti, it's an art installation. And I said, What do you mean? And he said, Well, those are dormant snails. It's written in snails. And snails sleep for three years, and they're sitting on a piece of paper mache. Each snail is asleep. I mean, I don't know. I'm just telling you what he told me. Each snail is asleep, and they'll wake up in three years and they will have their first meal of that paper mache, that flower and paste, and then they'll leave. And I thought, what an image for detention and what a metaphor for that. And I just knew that I was going to be writing about this. That was that was it for me. I was, you know, I was done.
SPEAKER_02:And can you give the emotion you felt at that time a name?
SPEAKER_00:Dark, darkness. I just felt so heavy in my heart. Like um, I just felt that I was in a sacred space that that, you know, I I mean, the the good part of it is that the people who lived there actually fared okay. I mean, it was a detention center, they were hungry, they were cold. And the the plaque I saw was because the people of Aberlo Bello, who had probably never seen Jews and didn't know what a Jew was, and probably thought they were like, you know, the demon, realized they were just people like them. And um, I mean, there's a little bit more. I mean, the fact that that um the the Joseph who goes into town as a dentist and works, that's historically accurate. They the professional people would go into town. And the townspeople were like, they're just like us. And they took, they took care of them. They they they fed them, they gave them clothes, they helped them in, you know, and enough so that the the people of Jerusalem sent this olive tree, which I assume has grown larger since I saw it.
SPEAKER_02:And the snails come back later in the book through Laura.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, Laura gets into snails. She has a terrarium of them, and she she does an art, she winds up doing an art installation and at the end. Um, and and the the phrase, I will not be here forever. So part of what motivates Laura in her journey, I mean, Laura goes back to Italy and Laura's mother disappears when she's 12 years old, and she's 42 years old in the book, and she's gone back to sort of search for her mother's story. And one of her things that she has to guide her are these paintings that her mother did of what basically the Red House. And on the back of the paintings, the mother would write, I will not be here forever. So that that informs Laura in her search for her understanding, her her mother.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I'd like to talk about a character in the book who stood out to me. Just thought he was a wonderful character. To get to him, I'm going to bring up something that you wrote on page 116. You wrote about Angelo. Quote Angelo is used to twists and turns of fate. He has lived through wars, the death of his parents, his wife, and his only child. Only the angels have stayed with him. Has he already done something wrong here? He follows a soldier down a flight of stairs, then another. Into the sub basement of the Red House. He envisions what awaits him imprisonment, deportation, torture, perhaps worse. End quote. How did Angelo's character derive?
SPEAKER_00:So um there is a chapel. That chapel does exist in the Red House. There was an artist, I think he was Hungarian. Um I can't remember his name, but I have it, I mean it's in my notes. So the the commandante of the Red House wanted someone to do a chapel, and this gentleman did this chapel, you know, and I don't know how long he was there, but he he made this chapel. One of the interesting things about the chapel is when you go into it, it looks like you know, a church in Naples. I mean, it it's got, you know, it's got the angels and the saints, and you know, the all of the stations of the cross, or it has it has all of that, you know, kind of going around it. And it looks like mosaic, but um, the the artist actually didn't have any mosaic, so he painted, frescoed them, and then he hand-carved into little squares to make it uh like look like mosaic. So it's fascinating. And that is, you know, kind of I mean, I mean, this this person, Carlo Palm Palma, I think his name was, who had the keys, who brought me into the Red House, brought us into this chapel. I mean, it was so bizarre. And then it's also bizarre because I've tried many, many times to reach out to Carlo again. He just doesn't get back to me. But but maybe that was maybe that was his role was to just guide me in, you know, and not, you know, I'm not really sure why I I can't reach him again, but whatever that is. But you know, Angelo, so Angelo is based on that that artist and that, you know, that chapel that that I saw.
SPEAKER_02:Angelo's quiet endurance contrasts with Laura's restless searching. Do you see them as mirrors or opposites?
SPEAKER_00:Uh obviously they're both tormented in their own way. Laura is a more, you know, visibly restless soul, and and Angelo has his demons that I don't want to, no spoilers, but you know, has his demons also. But I think that, you know, look, art informs all of them. Visual art, Viola, Angelo, and Laura. And I think, you know, Laura is looking for a kind of peace that I I like to feel she's found by the end.
SPEAKER_02:The book carries a quiet tension between memory and reality and what a child remembers as opposed to adult memories. Was it difficult for you moving between the two? And did you write the story as it appears in sequence or in scenes? Maybe because I'm left-handed.
SPEAKER_00:I I have a sort of modular relationship to the world as opposed to a linear relationship to the world. So I never do anything in a straight line. I definitely don't write in a straight line. I write in scenes. I don't know where the scenes are going to go necessarily. So I develop different moments and then I kind of figure out kind of where, you know, how to how to line it all up.
SPEAKER_02:Another component of the Red House is that there's a haunting quality in how love and loss intertwine throughout the story. Were there any works of art, literature, or personal experiences that helped shape that mood?
SPEAKER_00:Well, I I so there's several things. I mean, certainly, you know, the question about literature, you know, when I think about love and loss, I mean, I think of Anna Karen and I, I think of, you know, many of the great works of literature. Um, Jude the Obscure, you know, Hardy, I love Hardy for that sense of longing and loss. There was a book, I believe, was nominated for the book or last year called The Safekeep, that's um a very interesting story about loss. You know, it's one of the big themes, right? But to go back to the complicated relationship I had with my mother, my mother had this habit of kind of losing me in places. Like she would sort of wander off. I mean, it's kind of funny in retrospect, but you know, like my brother and I, she took us for, you know, we come from Illinois, she decided she wanted to go to the Easter parade in New York. I was 12, my brother was nine, and she saw a hat she liked and she wandered off into the Easter parade. My brother and I were just standing on a street corner, like, what do we do now? So I think it made me a good traveler because I got very good navigational skills. Um, it also made me not afraid to ask directions. Like I did go to a policeman and I said, Um, you know, I think we've lost our mother. And um, you know, we're supposed to have lunch at something called Rumpel Stiltskins. And he looked at me and he said, Do you mean Rumpel Myers? And I said, That sounds about right. I mean, I didn't know we were going, I didn't know we're going for lunch. She made a reservation somewhere, you know. Cop helps us get to Rumpel Myers, and my brother and I sit and we order hot chocolate, and my mother comes in screaming, like, my children, where am I? So she would lose us, you know, it it happened like a lot. And um, the the last time it happened, I remember was in the the Harvard, um, the Harvard coup where um I ran into this. I I lost her. She was, she wandered off, she she lost me. And this lovely Indian couple was there who I was friendly with, and they said, I hi Mary, we haven't seen you in so long. Is everything all right? And I said, Well, I'm fine, but I've just lost my mother. And they offered their condolences. They said, We're so sorry. And I said, No, no, I've lost her in the store. So it's it's kind of funny, but also it, you know, it's sort of about abandonment, you know, and loss, and that kind of mother that can just wander off because she sees a hat or a dress or something that interests her. And um, so it's kind of a personal theme for me. But also in terms of things I read, you know, I I don't read comic fiction. I don't really like, I don't really like, I I love funny things, but in my art, and I guess in my heart, in my art, my soul, um, I'm a pretty serious person, and and the question, you know, loss and love, longing, I suppose, is is is a big thing.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, I find that fascinating because it's almost like your personal thoughts and fears of abandonment have come up through your subconscious in this story of the Red House.
SPEAKER_00:I'm I'm all about maternal abandonment. Um it's a big thing for me.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, thanks for sharing that with us, Mary. Now that you've written this book and lived with its themes, what does creative courage look like for you today?
SPEAKER_00:You know, for so many years, um, I was worried about money and I was raising a family, and I had all these things I was worried about. And I was worried about my career and reviews and you know, all this stuff. And something about publishing this book, I'm free. I don't care. I feel this sense of freedom that I I don't know that I've felt since I began writing stories. Uh, my husband was really great about this once. I was in a real slump a couple years ago. And I said, I said, I don't know, I just feel like nothing's working. He said, Why don't you just start writing stories again like you wrote them when you were 20 years old, and you just love to write stories. And that's what I've gone back to. I've gone back to this girl, even third grade, you know, just do I'm I'm doing it for the love of it, and uh, and not because of the market. I don't I don't know what's gonna happen with what I'm working on now. I'm doing it for a sense of freedom. Um, there's a couple of painters, there's one painter, an incredible, I think she's Nigerian British named um Jotty. I'm gonna mess up her last name. She paints with just incredible freedom. And I love whenever I can go see her work, just to experience that sense of flow, I guess what I'm saying. Is it that artists and writers who have a sense of flow? I mean, I mean, story is very important. I mean, grounding. I mean, I'm not talking about craft particularly, but just the internal process of like of freedom, you know, just freedom.
SPEAKER_02:I wonder if that feeling of freedom has come through writing about maternal abandonment through Viola and uh Laura.
SPEAKER_00:I think that's no, I think that's a great I I feel that it, you know, I feel that I have gotten that out. Um and and I'm I'm actually kind of taking on a bigger world now in a different something that I'm thinking working on. You know, I'm I I don't believe that writing is therapy, but I do believe it's therapeutic.
SPEAKER_02:My goodness, Mary, I love this conversation. I could keep chatting with you all day. I think we both could.
SPEAKER_00:Before we go, tell me what you're currently reading. I'm doing a lot of research reading. So that's kind of really um interesting and fun. And I can get a little obsessed with it. I've gotten slightly obsessed about the history of silent films and D.W. Griffith's early films because uh my daughter got a piece of property upstate about seven or eight years ago that we thought was probably going to be a disaster that's actually turned into quite a special, a special place. Um, and and DW Griffith did his first silent films on the banks of the Never Sink River. Um I'm reading a lot about D.W. Griffith and silent films and and all of that. Um and I'm reading a novel I really like right now called Um The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. It's uh was recommended to me by a couple friends. And um, so I usually try to read a mix of I don't sleep very much. Um I would love to sleep. If anyone has any ideas, I'm open to them. Um, but I found that at late at night I read on my Kindle so as not to disturb my long-suffering husband. So I'll I'll read different, usually contemporary things at night. Do you still read and write poetry? I do. I actually just wrote a book in Copenhagen called The Tear Eating Bat. There is actually a bat that eats lives on, thrives on tears. I get a little obsessed about things, you know. I find I find a lot of rabbit holes. I'm really into this bat because it lives it lives on grief, not blood, but grief. Yeah. So I do write poetry.
SPEAKER_02:Oh gosh, Mary, I have loved chatting with you. Uh, we need to meet again and uh have a cup of coffee together. That would be lovely. And thank you so much for your time and for offering to do this interview when you have a terrible cold. And for writing The Red House. It truly is a beautiful, beautiful book.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you, man. I've loved chatting with you. It and I hasn't it's felt, I don't know, it's been great, really great. I think we could keep chatting a long time.
SPEAKER_02:You've been listening to my conversation with author Mary Morris about her new book, The Red House. 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. To find out more about the Bookshop Podcast, go to thebookshoppodcast.com. 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 thebookshoppodcast.com. The Bookshop Podcast is written and produced by me, Mandy Jackson Beverly. The music provided by Brian Beverly and my personal assistant is Kaylee Dichinger. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time.