If the shoe fits...

New York writer Adriana Trigiani is immensely proud of her Italian origins. Photo / Supplied

Shoes are irresistible, it seems. Just like Sex & the City's fictional Carrie Bradshaw, thousands of real-life shoe addicts have closets stuffed full of impractical high-heeled creations and still want more. But that's not why bestselling Italian American author Adriana Trigiani chose to set her latest trilogy of novels in the world of shoes.

"My grandfather was a cobbler and I'd always wanted to write about him and go to Italy to learn the craft of shoemaking," she says. "But if anything I resisted it at first because of the whole shoe mania."

Trigiani specialises in humorous, heart-warming stories with an Italian American flavour and a nostalgic feel.

Novels like her Big Stone Gap series, Rococo and Lucia, Lucia have won her legions of devoted fans across 33 countries. Her latest book, Very Valentine (Simon & Schuster, $35), is the story of the Angelini Shoe Company, makers of custom wedding shoes since 1903, and on the brink of financial ruin.

Valentine Roncalli can't bear to say goodbye to the old family business or its original home, a Greenwich Village building. And so the apprentice shoemaker attempts to bring the business into the 21st century as she falls in love and bickers with her family along the way.

When Trigiani finished writing the novel more than a year ago there was no recession happening and a story about a small business struggling to survive didn't seem especially of the moment.

"Now people are saying, what the heck, did you have your finger on the pulse," says Trigiani, who explains she had an inkling something was up when she noticed new high rises near her Greenwich Village home weren't filling with residents.

"I try to plug into the things going on around me and I kept looking at those high rises with no one living in them and thinking, why aren't they sold, something's happening. They were stuck in the ground like big thermometers - like stone cold."

In many ways Very Valentine is a love letter to the neighbourhood she lives in because she likes to be surrounded by creative people. Trigiani has watched it change as money moved in and she's seen the original residents clinging on to the old ways. There was one old woman in particular she started to look out for.

"She's a stranger to me but I became obsessed with her growing her tomatoes on her roof wearing her housecoat," the author explains. "She reminded me of my grandmother Viola."

Musing on this idea of the old world struggling to survive in the new, Trigiani headed off to Capri to learn to make shoes the traditional way. "I'm fascinated by anything handmade. And in Italy it was very enchanting as I watched them make the shoes, the rhythm of it."

The book she concocted from these disparate inspirations is her best seller yet in the US, despite the bleak financial times. "I think the reason people are going crazy for Very Valentine is that its message is do what you love and it'll work out. Don't waste your life doing something you don't love or being with someone you don't love."

Trigiani herself was many things before she became a novelist.

She had a comedy group and worked the club circuit for seven years ("which nearly killed me") then wrote and produced for television. But it's the craft of fiction she loves most.

"Every moment I write is blissful," she enthuses. "It's fundamental to me. I have to do it. I never get blocked. I come up with an outline, names and characters and then there's a delicious period where I'm just playing with it."

Raised in a big Italian family in a West Virginia coal-mining town, she's exploited her background and culture as a basis for her stories.

"As a kid in Virginia whenever they asked for my nationality, I put down Italian - that's how much I identified with my roots," she says. "Now wherever I go when I meet Italian Americans there's a connection. We've never lost what we were. We love our ways, our culture, our cooking and our sense of family. We love very deep and our vendettas are very real."

Trigiani will return to her childhood home Big Stone Gap this US summer to direct an independent movie of her first novel. Then she'll complete the Very Valentine trilogy. And after that? "I have lots more to explore, ideas after ideas," says the mother of one. "I'm just trying to work out how much I can do in my lifetime. You do feel it once you turn 40. You start doing the maths."

Funnily enough, Trigiani has another Sex & the City connection besides the whole shoe business. She's close friends with the show's writer director Michael Patrick King.

"We live in the same building," she explains.

"I read my writing to him and he reads me his scripts. In fact, I've been the inspiration for some of the show's non-sex storylines!"