Hello Beautiful
Hello Beautiful
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Ann Napolitano on Hello Beautiful
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
April 2020 and no way to grieveNapolitano’s nine-month planning window, the period she reserves before every novel to think without writing, was always going to end in April 2020. She had no way to know her father would die that same month, or that the pandemic would make it impossible to be with him or to gather with family afterward. When she finally sat down to write, the emotional conditions she brought to the page were not background noise. They were the engine.
Part of the reason I write is to make sense of myself and the world, and that felt necessary: we were housebound because of COVID, I was trying to make my two sons feel safe even though I didn’t, and my father had just died.
William, the novel’s first protagonist, enters the story as a child abandoned by his mother and unable to form the attachments around him. Napolitano has described recognizing herself in that particular emotional frequency the moment she began writing, not because her circumstances matched his, but because grief and isolation had narrowed her to the same frequency.
I started this book at the beginning of the pandemic, and my father had just died. In a way, I entered this book lonely like William. I was craving connection and vitality, and the four girls embodied those qualities when they were in the same room. I loved them immediately, and that love nourished not only William but me, too.
The Padavano sisters, the four daughters at the novel’s center, were rooted in years of observing her best friend Leah’s family. Napolitano watched those sisters and noticed something she wanted to understand well enough to build a novel around.
They had slightly different versions of the same face, and they seemed more themselves when they’re in the same room together than they did when they were separated. And that was completely fascinating to me.
The title itself arrived from childhood. Napolitano’s uncle Ed had lived in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago and sent her postcards always addressed ‘Hello Beautiful,’ a greeting that made a shy, bookish girl feel genuinely seen. That experience of being recognized for an interior self, rather than a visible surface, shaped Charlie Padavano, the sisters’ father, whose warmth toward his daughters she modeled partly on her own father.
He always greets his four daughters with the words hello beautiful, and the warmth and sincerity of this greeting pulls each girl’s specific, inner beauty to the surface.
How she wrote it
Nine months of thinking, two years of feverNapolitano treats the act of writing and the act of thinking as incompatible, and has built a process around that incompatibility. For every novel, she spends nine months reading, planning, and researching before she writes a single sentence. The rule is not about discipline. It is about how her brain actually functions.
I can’t think when I’m writing. There’s a lyricism to it and I’m following the language and discovering things, but I cannot use my brain. So I’ve found out that this is what works best for me, to only use my brain for nine months and figure out as much as I can. And then when I finally get to write it’s a joy.
Those nine preparatory months for Hello Beautiful sent her deep into the history of American basketball, a subject she had been reading about for years. The sport’s arc through the twentieth century, and its entanglement with the civil rights movement, gave the novel its historical scaffolding and William his obsession.
A few years ago, I became obsessed with the history of basketball; I was and am fascinated by how the history of this American sport parallels the history of racism in our country. In pursuit of this obsession, and as research for Hello Beautiful, I read many books about basketball.
Even with nine months of preparation behind her, Napolitano begins each novel with only a handful of fixed points. The rest she finds in the act of writing, which means she often arrives at scenes before she understands what they require. That uncertainty was not a problem for Hello Beautiful. It was the method.
When the book starts, William is this lonely, sad, brokenhearted little boy. And I want to find out if he can be OK after the childhood that he had. And I really wasn’t sure. So I had to walk through line after line, scene after scene, interaction after interaction and be like, is this true? Like, is this how it would feel?
The connection to Little Women, the novel whose structure and sisterhood most clearly shadow Hello Beautiful, was not planned. Napolitano was roughly eighty pages into her first draft when she wrote a scene where the Padavano sisters began debating which of Louisa May Alcott’s March sisters each of them resembled. Only then did the architecture she had been building snap into focus.
I wasn’t aware of a book inspiring Hello Beautiful until I was well into the first draft, and the Padavano sisters started to compare themselves to the sisters from Little Women. Once this happened, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen the connections earlier... I’m often surprised when I write; my work is usually wiser than I am. Little Women was one of my favorite books growing up, and it clearly never left me.
The previous two novels each took eight years to write. Hello Beautiful took two. When she finished, the speed of it left a gap she had not anticipated.
I was depressed when I finished it because I had to leave them. Finishing the book and handing it over so it’s not mine anymore, I was depressed for like two months. Because I missed them. [paraphrased from audio]
That two-month depression is its own kind of evidence. A book written under grief, finished in a fraction of the usual time, had become the place she lived.
The personal thread
Writing the wake she couldn’t attendBecause of the pandemic, Napolitano could not be at her father’s deathbed, could not travel, and could not gather with family to mourn. The novel gave her a structure for grief that circumstances had denied. Charlie Padavano’s death was not planned in the outline; it happened during the writing. When it did, the scene became something more than fiction.
In writing Charlie’s passing, which I didn’t know was going to happen ahead of time, it was really nice for me because I got to go through the wake and the burial and the gathering for his passing that I wasn’t able to go through for my father. [paraphrased from audio]
Her uncle Ed’s postcards and Charlie’s greeting are both versions of the same act: seeing a person’s interior rather than their surface. Napolitano has said that question, what it means to be truly seen, was not a theme she assigned to the book from the outside. She was working it out for herself as she wrote.
I really felt like I was trying to figure out what love was for myself. I was trying to explore the idea of being seen for who you really are as opposed to when people in your life look at you and see someone that you don’t recognize. [paraphrased from audio]
What she wants us to sit with
Fault lines, roots, and the door that stays openThe novel spans four generations of the Padavano and Shine families, following inherited damage as it moves forward in time through people who are often actively trying to escape it. Napolitano has been direct about what she believes that pattern means, and the belief is not comfortable.
The fault lines that run through our parents often run into us, even if we weren’t alive when those fault lines were created. And they become part of our DNA and our behaviors. Even if we’re trying as hard as we can to run away from them, they are, in that instance, still shaping our lives.
Against that weight of inheritance, the novel places sisterhood. Napolitano has described the bond between the Padavano sisters not as warmth or loyalty but as something structural, something that persists below the level of choice.
I think because you grow up, obviously, from the very beginning and you know each other inside and out and you know all of each other’s embarrassing secrets and worst moments and you know each other at each stage of your lives, there’s just a—that’s like a rooting system that runs all the way down into the earth. And so even if you try to walk away from each other, I think there’s always that possibility and even encouragement to walk back because the roots don’t go away.
The question the novel asks of its characters, whether repair is possible after rupture, is also the question Napolitano wants readers to carry out of the book and into their own lives. She has been specific about what she hopes a reader does after the last page.
What I hope is that people finish it feeling like it’s never too late to reach out to the person that you lost... that that connection really is deeply, deeply important. And it’s also never too late to reach out for the person that you want to be. [paraphrased from audio]