The View From Lake Como
The View From Lake Como
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Adriana Trigiani on The View From Lake Como
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A nightgown, a town, and a woman who died too youngThe book’s origin arrived in a yellow box at a Philadelphia signing, more than a decade before publication. A cousin brought Trigiani objects left behind by their great-grandmother Giuseppina Perin, a Venetian woman who died of pleurisy at forty-two, known to Trigiani only through family stories. That encounter with a ghost she had never met planted the seed for a novel she would spend years figuring out how to tell.
The View from Lake Como is a modern retelling of my great grandmother Giuseppina Perin (on my paternal grandmother’s side). Giuseppina was from the Veneto, a proud Venetian. She died very young—of pleurisy at the age of 42. I only knew her through the stories told by my grandmother and great aunts and uncles—and she always intrigued me.
One object inside that yellow box became the novel’s emotional anchor. The nightgown, stitched in red thread with a woman’s name, connected Trigiani to an ancestor she could not otherwise reach. She decided to set the book in the present rather than at the turn of the last century, a choice that let her speak directly to living readers while keeping her great-grandmother close.
In that box was her nightgown; at the turn of the last century, it was popular to hand stitch a cotton nightgown with your own signature in red thread... I kept that nightgown – it’s my talisman. I set the story now because I wanted to speak directly to a modern, contemporary audience of women. My great-grandmother is alive and well in the pages of these books.
The pivot from historical fiction to contemporary comedy was also a practical response to the book market. After the deep archival work of her 2022 novel The Good Left Undone, Trigiani read audience appetite and changed course, transplanting Giuseppina’s story wholesale into the present day.
I thought, wouldn’t it be fun, people need to laugh, why don’t I take her story and set it now? And put it in contemporary times and have fun with it and turn it into a comedy and that’s what I did. [paraphrased from audio]
The second structural engine came from a piece of real-estate history. Around 2004, the New Jersey shore town of South Belmar renamed itself Lake Como after the small lake within its borders, partly to reverse declining property values. Trigiani saw in that act of reinvention an exact parallel to her protagonist, a thirty-three-year-old woman also in need of reclaiming herself.
I was so blown away by this research and realized that the story of the town and of the protagonist of the novel—Giuseppina Capodimonte Baratta Bilancia, 33, and living in her parents’ basement—is the same story. What happened to Giuseppina? How would she re-claim her life on her own terms?
Years of book-tour conversations with readers across generations gave Trigiani the emotional argument she needed to write the book at all. The pattern she observed was the same regardless of the woman’s age, and it became the novel’s explicit premise.
From young women to middle-aged women to older women, one common similarity among them is that eventually they fall into a life of taking care of everybody around them and not themselves.
How she wrote it
Marble dust, a miner’s warning, and a structure borrowed from a decoratorThe three-part structure of the novel came from a single sentence Trigiani encountered while reading a nonfiction book by Ludwig Bemelmans, the creator of Madeline, deep into the drafting process. The interior decorator Elsie de Wolfe had observed that Italians manage grief through three routes. Trigiani pulled the line as her epigraph and let each phrase become a section title, a superstructure she had not planned but could not resist.
Each piece of that quote fed into the storyline. This idea that you can emotionally walk the landscape of your life with those three emotions appealed to me as a superstructure for a novel.
Marble, the novel’s central industry and metaphor, required Trigiani to travel to Carrara and climb the mountain herself. She had first photographed the stone at a New Jersey wedding roughly fifteen years before writing the book. The research trip gave her a fact that stopped her: the same quarry that supplied Michelangelo for the David still supplies the world.
The same mountain where Michelangelo got his marble to carve the David is the same mountain that still provides marble all around the world to build churches, synagogues, and mosques. It’s the same marble. And I thought this was incredible. [paraphrased from audio]
A miner she met on that mountain offered her the image that became the novel’s quietly terrifying undercurrent. He was describing the permanence of the stone in geological terms, but for Trigiani the remark carried a different weight: human lives are finite, stone is not.
We’ll be gone, the world will be gone, but the marble will remain. They’ll never run out of marble. [paraphrased from audio]
Marble also gave her the controlling metaphor for her protagonist Jess’s inner life. Trigiani drew the parallel explicitly in conversation: the David has survived centuries, but strike marble at precisely the wrong angle and it powders. That duality, near-indestructible yet suddenly fragile, mapped exactly onto what she wanted to say about women’s resilience.
She observes this. That’s her heart really, herself, her soul. Like it’s like a woman. You tap it just in the wrong way, goodbye. [paraphrased from audio]
From the beginning, Trigiani fought to keep the book categorized as a self-love story rather than a romance, a distinction that mattered to the entire shape of the plot. Publishers expected a love interest to carry the narrative forward; she insisted on a different engine.
I kept saying to the publishers... hey, this is a self-love story. She’s not going to navigate this through relationship, she’s going to navigate it through her life experience. [paraphrased from audio]
What she wants us to sit with
Joy first, then the harder question underneath itWhen asked directly what she hoped readers would take from the book, Trigiani gave the shortest possible answer. She had written comedy on purpose, and she wanted the comedy to land without apology.
Joy. Sheer joy … and the pleasure of reading a book with humor.
She was equally deliberate about how Jess resolves her relationship with a family that has withheld the truth from her. The novel refuses the clean break that contemporary fiction often offers, because Trigiani had watched real people pay the price for that choice.
She has a family that has not been transparent with her, but she loves them... I didn’t want this to be one of those novels where she ends up putting her family on the island and not speaking to them for years. If anyone’s been in that situation with a friend or family member, it’s torture.
She also thought about the readers who would never board a plane to Italy, and designed the setting with them in mind. The Italy sections are written as an experience of access, a way for the novel to deliver something travel cannot be taken for granted to provide.
I do know that everyone can’t afford to go to Italy this year. But... you can pick up a book and you can be there right now, and it’s the best trip you’ll make because you’ll be engaging your imagination and your soul and the sense of your own possibility. [paraphrased from audio]
Behind the comedy and the setting, Trigiani’s deepest claim is about what storytelling actually does to a person’s sense of the future. She returned to this idea across multiple interviews, and it is where her belief in the form goes beyond craft into something closer to an argument for why fiction exists at all.
Storytelling is essential to the survival of our human race—how we see ourselves is what we will become.
Jess’s arc, a woman in her mid-thirties rebuilding her own story from a basement in New Jersey, is Trigiani’s demonstration of that claim at novel length.