Nicky Pellegrino explains how her latest 'love story' could well be something else.
More often than not things don't turn out the way I plan them. I remember when my first novel Delicious was published in the UK and emblazoned on the cover I found the words, "the year's most satisfying romance". I'm sorry? Romance? I'd had absolutely no idea that's what I'd been writing.
Over the years I continued producing stories about friendship, family and food set between Italy and England, books I categorised as contemporary women's fiction but other people preferred to call romance or chick lit.
So when I embarked on my latest release, The Villa Girls (Orion, $39.99) I decided it was time to write a proper romance. A really good love story. On purpose.
It didn't go that well. Crucially, what I realised very early in the proceedings was that I didn't have the faintest idea what made one person fall for another. Was it timing? Need? Fate? Lust? Or something else entirely?
Research was necessary. As we were driving along one evening I asked my husband of 12 years, "What do you think it was that made us choose each other, fall in love and stay together so blissfully, my darling?"
He replied, without taking his eyes from the road, "You just latched on, didn't you?"
No one else was much help, either. Friends and family members found it difficult to define exactly what it was that had brought them together. I began to feel a hitherto unimagined sympathy with Prince Charles who, when asked whether he was in love with his new fiancee Diana Spencer, famously replied, "Whatever in love means."
For love is the greatest mystery. That's precisely why so many poems, songs and stories have been written about it. Science can't explain it, not really. Love is phenomenal. So far my attempt at a romance wasn't.
My salvation came in the form of an invitation from Branka Simunovich to visit her vast olive estate south of Auckland and witness the harvest. I watched the fruit being shaken from the trees, saw it being pressed, tasted a spoonful of pure liquid gold and listened to Branka talk with such passion about olive oil. And I decided at the heart of The Villa Girls was going to be a story about an olive estate.
There were other things that influenced me. For instance, I realised I'd written four novels about food and Italy without ever dealing with the often tricky relationship many women have with eating or with the corruption that underpins much of Italian life, particularly in the south.
Then one day when I must have been feeling slightly exhausted, I had a grumpy moment about the way everyone has to be so goal-driven these days, always stretching for the next thing, never content. And I wondered what it would be like to write a story about someone who was entirely happy with life the way it is and not set on self-improvement.
And so The Villa Girls became a novel about a young English woman called Rosie - a successful food stylist who doesn't want to change anything about her life. And a young man called Enzo who's set to inherit a vast southern Italian olive estate and isn't certain he wants any of the things that lie in store for him. This was a plot strong enough to carry the grittier of my themes although it did mean I developed a financially ruinous taste for the finest boutique olive oils.
It's early days but so far it seems to be a book people like. One of my publishers described it as "emotive, beautifully paced, fulfilling".
My husband said it was a page-turner that brought a tear to his eye (and as we've already established he's brutally honest). And so I've written another book about friendship, family and food. But is it a romance? Hmm, more often than not things don't turn out the way I plan them ...
