Figure magazine
January/February 2006

Queen of the Big Time

Novelist Adriana Trigiani talks about her best-selling books, her huge Italian family and, oh, yeah, the movie she’s directing on the side.

By Corrie Pikul

Just before nine o’clock on a Wednesday morning, most New Yorkers are stumbling into cubicles, clutching coffee cups and desperately trying to recover from last night’s late dinner or near all-nighter at the office. But down in the West Village, 46-year-old blockbuster novelist Adriana Trigiani has been working for hours. “I’m up so early you’d laugh!” she says.

This morning, Trigiani woke at 4:30, jogged a couple of miles along the Hudson River, and is now sitting in her apartment dressed in black pants, a hand-knit salt-and-pepper sweater and black flip flops. A professional multi-tasker, she’s eating breakfast, talking to her husband, lighting designer Tim Stephenson, and trying to discipline Lucia, their 3-year-old daughter.

Adriana Trigiani—her friends call her “Adri”—is the bestselling author of six books, including the beloved Big Stone Gap trilogy, about an Italian-American woman trying to find meaning and love in a coal-mining town in 1970s Virginia. Readers immediately warmed to Big Stone Gap’s Ave Maria Mulligan, who sounds like Trigian’s alter ego: same hometown (Big Stone Gap, Viriginia), same ethnicity (Trigiani’s parents immigrated from Italy), same “brown eyes, good teeth, nice lips,” same irrepressible mass of curly hair, and same big-hearted spirit and boundless energy.

Then again, there’s a piece of Trigiani in each of her characters. Like Lucia, Lucia’s plucky seamstress, Trigiani loves fine fashion. And, like Nella Castelluca in The Queen of the Big Time, Trigiani is the middle daughter in a big, close-knit Italian-American family who yearns to leave the farm in Rosetto, Pennsylvania, (where the author lived until she was 6) to test her fortunes “in town.”

One of Trigiani’s close friends thinks she most resembles Bartolomeo di Crespi, the flamboyant male interior designer from her latest book, Rococo (June 2005). “I laughed until I was sick,” Trigiani says. She does, however, share Bartolomeo’s passion for home design. “I go into people’s apartments and say, ‘Ok, this needs to go here and that needs to go there.’” Trigiani also shares his passion for solitude. “I think that’s true of anyone who’s an artist–a writer, painter or designer. You need alone time to gestate.” However, Trigiani and Bartolomeo also love spending time with their families.

Trigiani’s family—she has four sisters and two brothers—plays a major role in her life. She still regularly visits her mother in Big Stone Gap and recently collaborated with her sisters on a cookbook of family recipes, including Grandmom Trigiani’s Veal Sauce and cousin Mafalda’s Risotto alla Milanese.

There’s also another important family in Trigiani’s life: her readers and fans around the world. “I looove my readers,” she often says. Her Web site, adrianatrigiani.com, has a page plastered with photos sent to her by admirers. When she’s promoting one of her novels on tour, Trigiani often has lunch with book clubs in the New York area. At night, after her daughter goes to sleep, she puts on her headset and calls into club meetings. She wanders around the house, picking up toys and straightening things up while answering readers’ questions.

Trigiani doesn’t consider this “work.” Rather, she is energized and motivated by feedback from her readers. And when the characters of Big Stone Gap soon (right bk?) come to the big screen, she will be able to reach out to even more friends and fans.

Early Career Years

A confirmed workaholic, Trigiani started writing fiction six years ago. After graduating from St. Mary’s College of Notre Dame in 1981 with a theater degree, she moved from Indiana to New York City, hoping to become a playwright. She quickly learned, however, that she’d need other sources of income, so she worked as a temp, a nanny and a cinema ticket-seller. (She was soon fired when her manager realized she was bad at making change). At night, Trigiani performed in an all-girls stand-up comedy group called "The Outcasts," and worked on her plays.

Still, she was barely able to afford her rent, but when a friend suggested she try writing for television, Trigiani demurred. “I wasn’t a TV kid,” she says. “We didn’t get good reception growing up, so I couldn’t see or hear anything well enough to get into it.” The friend persisted, saying television was like “an electronic play,” which sparked something in Trigiani. “I thought, “Well, I know how to do that.”

Her big break came in 1989, when she was hired to write for the The Cosby Show spin-off, A Different World. This job led to work writing for other television shows, and finally to The Cosby Show itself. “That was the best, best, best of all of them,” Trigiani says. She loved coming up with story ideas, including the relationship between well-to-do Vanessa Cosby and Dabnis Brickey, a blue-collar maintenance worker at her school. She also enjoyed the exposure and status that comes with writing for a top-rated sitcom. “That job changed my life,” she says.

Creating the Books

After a decade in television, Trigiani fell into fiction almost accidentally. Big Stone Gap started out as a screenplay, but Trigiani’s friend and agent Suzanne Gluck thought it would work better as a novel. Trigiani would wake at 3 a.m. to write before heading into the office. It was grueling, but it was also worth it. Big Stone Gap was an instant hit: People magazine called it “delightfully quirky” and named it Book of the Week, and the New York Times Book Review said it was “as comforting as a mug of chamomile tea on a rainy Sunday.” More than one million copies of the Big Stone Gap trilogy, which includes the sequels Big Cherry Holler and Milk Glass Moon, are currently in print. Trigiani says that she owes it to her readers to produce a book a year. Next fall, she will revisit the characters of Big Stone Gap.

The stories in her books are remarkably diverse, spiriting readers from rural Virginia to northern Italy, from the slate quarries of Pennsylvania to mid-century Greenwich Village. Yet the novels are mostly populated by “regular folk” such as Ave Maria from the Big Stone Gap trilogy, a pharmacist at a family-owned apothecary who also volunteers for the Rescue Squad. Ave’s husband is a coal miner and her best friend is a teacher.

Mentored by playwright Ruth Goetz, who wrote The Heiress, Trigiani remembers Goetz telling her: “You have an American voice, you have the voice of the working class.” She wasn’t flattered. “I thought to myself, ‘but I’m so glamorous! I can’t believe she said that!’ I was mortified.” Trigiani now realizes that Goetz was right. “There is nothing as fulfilling to me as writing about working people. I love it.”

Identities and Expectations

The feeling of being an outsider (or a “ferriner,” as they say in the real Big Stone Gap) also prevails throughout her work. Her main characters often live on the fringe and discover true belonging only among their big and boisterous families.

Trigiani says that she felt different than the other kids growing up in Big Gap. “We’re Italian and Catholic and we moved to a coal-mining town where there were no Italians, and no Catholics, so we were an instant minority,” she said. “You live in a place like that with a name like mine – forget it! They don’t know what you are. I was so relieved in 1980 when the Cars album came out with the picture of that girl with the big red lips and curly hair. I thought, ‘Oh! So there are people that look like us!’”

Growing up as a “ferriner,” Trigiani learned to make her own rules and define herself in her own terms. “You have to find yourself interesting. You can’t control who loves you and thinks you’re attractive,” she says. “I really feel like wherever I am, is what I am. I felt like a mountain girl growing up. When I return to northern Italy, I feel like an Italian.” And even without a Southern accent, she becomes a Southerner in Big Stone Gap.

What’s Coming Up

Trigiani says she likes to surprise people and doesn’t like to be categorized. Her books have variously been described as everything from Southern, to women’s fiction, from Italian fiction to literary fiction. “Next thing you know, I’ll be writing about Russian Cossacks or something,” she laughs.

Despite her success as an author, Trigiani still is interested in TV. She currently has a pilot about “four moms in Greenwich Village” being considered for Lifetime. She’s also working on turning Rococo into a television series starring Mario Cantone, the comedian who did the reading for the audio version of the book. And, in her most high-profile project, she’s writing and directing the film adaptation of Big Stone Gap, which will hopefully come out “in the next couple of years.” She’s hoping to cast Whoopi Goldberg as Fleeta, the chain-smoking, straight-talking, possum-eating pharmacy clerk. She also reveals that there will be a lot of music in the movie, mostly from her friend Roseanne Cash.

No matter how hard she works, she still says it’s important “to build your work around your life,” because if you build your life around your work, “other people will allot your time.”

Maybe because her days are so jam packed with activities—tending to her daughter, working on her screenplay, taking conference calls with TV executives—Trigiani likes to get to bed “ridiculously early.” But if anyone speaks to the saying, “Early to bed, early to rise makes a man (woman) healthy, wealthy and wise,” it’s certainly Adriana Trigiani. And if you’re ever lucky enough to see her in action, you’ll surely start calling her “Adri.”