Are your breasts too small? Are you single this summer?

As I wait for my chapters to download or sit there mulling over ways to sneak some of my wacky language past my grammatically rigorous British editor, I've been grazing online, skimming over some Italian tips for the summer.

First of all, Are you ready to pass La Prova del Costume? Your Bikini Test?

Unfortunately, that doesn't only mean a wax and tan, it means you must have the curves in the right places, almighty ones such as so-and-so and such-and-such, and if not then Mamma Mia it's time to shift some weight. And beware! Is it possible you don't have the right bikini top to make a riveting gorge of your breasts?

I saw a television advertisement for a big phone company where a not-so-gorgeous woman and suave actor Raoul Bova are husband and wife sitting on a beach. The wife peers through her binoculars at some of the young buxom fauna bouncing past.

Darling, what would you give her out of ten? And that one, what about her?

Ho-hum. Raoul Bova - and the spectator - peer over the shapely girls shaking towels, shaking their assets. They are really something. Sure, we know Italian men have a license-to-perve, but why belittle the moderate-looking wife and make beauty into such a plastic, tarty thing? Why allow a young woman watching TV to think it is funny to laugh at an unattractive woman ranking half-naked stunners on a beach? Or a silly young bloke? Why must marriage remain this stale banter?

Enough. This morning a comment I wrote on another blog made me think of a string of summers I had a while back, when I used to go to Berlin to visit my gay mates. It was when I really needed to escape smaller children, the school run, Italy. In Berlin I wasn't a checked-out woman anymore, I wasn't glanced over to see if my boobs were good, if my arse was nice, how I was holding up. I was a friend of S&D who was hanging around, invited. All I did was follow conversations, or wander off, or say something that was listened to, even examined. It was such a relief to be a talking head instead of a talking body. It wasn't even odd going to the gay end of the park or the lake beach, stripping down and pulling out a book. It felt more mischievous to run away from the straight world, to pretend for a while that I wasn't burdened by gender, or coupledom, or motherhood.

At S&D's apartment I used to sleep in the library on a Napoleon III cherrywood bed which had four lion paws for feet. One night my youngest called up sobbing, he was with my first husband and his bird,

'Mummy, come home Mummy. Come home now, Mummy. Please, I want you.'

I lay there in Stefano's kimono under his rows and rows of first editions and his framed French prints. That night when we went out clubbing I knew I was a fake.

Caffè shakerato with my Aunt

As my publishing date comes nearer and I feel like running to the mountains, my Aunt has come to visit and my days have slowed. We sit under the grapevines in cane chairs enjoying the soft breeze. I think about watering the plants but don’t do it. Coffee materialises in our hands and the dogs snap at flies.

I think, It is summertime again, How did that happen?

When I was small I was afraid of my Aunt because she had a big voice and I never grew used to her. She lived abroad and we were a quiet family. She sang in an important choir, wore kaftans and didn’t care. She had a son with the bluest eyes and he used to cry when any of us plonked through Chopin on the piano.

One visit that I think we have all tried to erase from our hearts an accident happened and this boy’s life was taken away. At the time, we children were given improbable religious explanations, but the reason why this thing had to happen was not to be understood. We were told to go back to school while the adults sat around in shock, then clung to mourning.

Now, so many years on, when we have been drinking my aunt and I talk about how old her son would have been now, how handsome. I feel dizzy to think that my life travelled on, I grew up, I gave my parents grandkids. But I like to bring him into our talk. My Aunt is not sure whether to believe me, but this boy often comes to me, he is a man now, sending her comfort.

Vi facciamo neri!!!

I nearly left the road the first time I read this.

VI FACCIAMO NERI!!
WE'LL MAKE YOU BLACK!!

The banner comes out every summer and stretches over the front door of a beauty centre a few villages away, with a pumped-up and very tanned lady in a bikini next to the words. Every time I drive past I really stare to check I haven't made some translation mistake. A couple of times when I was already pissed off I have felt like stomping in there, shaking my wet swimming towel, and shrieking Whaat the? How can you appropriate the word 'black' when most of you are petrified of Africans and their black skin? Who on earth among you is going to walk through that door and willingly come out a black man or woman??

The thing is, Italy has been late to the party several times. They were late to join the scramble for Africa, ending up with Libya, a sliver of Somalia, disgrace in Ethiopia. And now the great wave of post-Independence migration has just recently hit Italy's coasts. I have heard hilarious stories from Ghanaian mates about posing as refugees from Liberia with their obviously Ghanaian names. Or the passport swapping that goes on because for the already-muddled carabinieri, all black people look the same (in Ghana people used to think all whites looked the same too, and the funniest crowd scene in my life took place when I was walking through the massive used clothes market in Rawlings Park and EVERY SINGLE PERSON started cracking up over my skinny non-African bum).

The thing is, everybody is afraid of real black skin here, that is why I can't understand the gist of that advertisement. My neighbour, a man who thinks our properties will both be handed down to the next generation when I know my kids will be taking off to Sydney or New York or Milan and I'll probably sell up, once told me I should watch out.

There is a shop near here where they congregate, he informed me. He didn't know I had to pass my Italian driving test with a bunch of fairly ordinary Senegalese.

I told him I knew the place he meant, which was true because the guy who runs it is called Omar and we once had a great laugh because I have a son called Omar too.

You've seen them out the front together, in those long dresses. My neighbour said they were all pimps and drug addicts, he was certain. They all had big cars.

That day I remember it was very hot and my neighbour spoke on at length but there was not a thing I could think of that was going to change his racist fears. I tried for a while, but then the idea of the men in robes set me thinking backwards. Back to my old hajis in Nima the Muslim quarter of Accra and the dusky call to prayer. Back to driving through Burkina with Cissé-the-crackhead and taking a wrong turn at Ouaga and doing 60kms of sandy road. Back to the night in the car on the border with Mali where we all woke caked in red dust - red fuzzy hair, red eyelashes. Back to the afternoon after Segou when I released cranky little Omar into the desert. Omar who was sick of the all-day driving, Omar who ran and ran and ran into the dust towards a big baobab tree, the biggest baobab tree I had ever seen.

Lascia ch'io pianga

Lascia ch'io pianga
La mia crude sorte

Let me weep over
My cruel fate

Words from an aria from Handel's opera Rinaldo, first performed in 1711, Almirina mourning her lost love, sung by my Facebooker daughter aged fifteen as I wept and her eye-rolling brother had to hold the camera.

Just too beautiful. And every time I cry.

Then afterward we pass an old lady on the footpath from the old people's home nearby. She is tiny with whiskers and looks up at my tall kids, one blond and wearing my heels not-too-shakily, one brown with a tidy afro today. Her eyes glistening, she wants to talk. Where are we from? Why are we here?

We tell her we are not really Italian, that we are somewhat mixed-up.

Well I was in Belgrade, she said. Where the two rivers meet and there is a yellow line down the middle. Because they are different, the two rivers. Ah, Beogrado!

My kids waited it out.

I used to be in Venice, she said happily, you could see she was sassy once. I knew Ernest Hemingway, she said. Do you know Ernest Hemingway?

I said I did. My daughter loved Fiesta.

Poor man! she said. Ah! But now I am here, look where I am. She looked in towards the entry gate of the old people's home. Another lady pushed along a frame.

Her eyes filled with tears and she asked me for a cigarette. There are three of us who smoke, she said cheekily. She showed me inside her handbag which had an empty packet.

We walked away for ice cream and my kids swore they would never put me in a home and my legs felt weak. We were each quiet for a while until we resumed talking about my daughter's excellent performance.

Eye candy

Well the photo shoot was done. I enlisted an age-appropriate BFF (daughter-speak) to model and then photoshopped away. Why am I doing my own cover? Apart from being quite the control freak (I can't believe I am admitting this) I started out studying Visual Communication, learnt basic lay-out work, colour-coding, photography, film, drawing and even some marketing before dropping out and gliding towards words, which I'd found impossible to betray. I don't know how many people suffer the same divide - words versus image. (Try adding music to that and you may understand my fix!) In the end I dropped image for a long while and sunk into words - history at university, years of reading, story-writing, the doomed first novel. Contented yes, but always feeling the seduction of good design, good photography.

Then falling in love with a photographer in the flesh made me change course so radically it puzzles me to be sitting where I am. For the length of our partnership I abandoned writing (though gained much material) and worked on image - a small design agency in Ghana, photography exhibitions (sadly I was the woman behind the man) and all the publicity material for our art gallery which continues to slip out of my books.

So I offered - well I begged - to do my cover design myself. I think there are elements of the story I know so well that come together, that invite the viewer with a few strong codes, or I truly hope so. I have been studying ladylit covers for so long now I am saturated and decided to veer far away from pastels, curly writing, heels and flutes of champagne. Instead I think I have made something that is more intriguing, and throws out a cheeky lure.

Would you like some eye candy so early in the day?

Camparification

I've finally sent it off. My final revisions. For a while there, I had the whole book in my head. I could locate scenes, verbs, conversations. I could weed out the repetitions, or remember where a hyphened word should have been without. (Oh dear but I had a good laugh! I adore Marilyn! I can't wait to make another reader giggle and heave. I hope!)

The chocolate and coffee required for that level of concentration was shameful. Coffee especially, with some well-deserved Camparification at the end of a few sweltering afternoons. And some numbing driving time in between which is always great to clear the deck.

Now, this week, I am plunging into cover design. For I want to stick to my concept, which has been approved, and adjust the photo, make it real. I am slightly terrified of meeting Photoshop again - hands bared - but it must done, must be thrashed out.

I have just finished reading Wannabe a Writer We've Heard Of which makes me feel like running up the hill. I am not a public persona. Never have been. Yesterday with two British ladies in a bar I tried on a semi-book-blurb but found I had lock-jaw. Jane Wenham-Jones is right. I have to insert my pitch into my brain, try it out in a deeper voice, wield a not-too-deep glass of prosecco.

Otherwise it is raining and cherry-picking has been suspended although I did prepare three bottles of cherry vodka for the winter. I'm off to work on my new Scarlatti sonata and ignore the hungry grouchy sons/nephew resurfacing after a long night out.

how about a quick interview for the ladies?

1. When did you first decide that you wanted to write?

As a child every great book I read made me want to be a writer. Certain books were so powerful and took reality to a heightened level. I have always been intrigued by writers’ lives and choices and work patterns. But also strong, transfixing stories and words rubbing against one another.

I remember getting very involved in the binding and illustrations for a book I wrote at twelve – without ever finishing it! Then for a long while I wrote terribly awful over-descriptive poems thinking I was touching the sap of Life. I left Australia when I was young, wrote a novel while working as an au pair in Paris which although it did well in a major competition, I didn’t possess the determination to re-edit and send it around, and soon left Paris for Milan and then Mogadishu.

In my early twenties I was far too busy with my personal life to see much through so I was hugely delighted when my first story was accepted when I was living in Somalia – freshly sacked from my embassy job with my first-born in a basket on the floor. It was called ‘Elton John’s Mother’ and dealt with a bunch of welfare Mums in a caravan park up the New South Wales coast who named their kids after pop stars.

2. What interests you as a writer?

I love to read, to receive books in the post, to spend hours in huge bookshops. I always think I haven’t read enough and there are so many contemporary and foreign and past writers whose work I would like to discover.

Having led a crazy and varied life I don’t usually have a problem with ideas which often spring forth, so presently I am more interested in what can transform a writer with talent into a writer who enjoys success. For ages I lived in Africa and in the early years before the internet writing involved typewriters, carbon paper and massive, soul-eroding waits for intercontinental replies. Now living in Italy, I feel I am ready to join the fray and understand more about how others have made the journey from pyjamas-and-a-laptop-in-bed to glossy covers and sweet-smelling pages. I went to my first writers’ festival last year – the Women’s Fiction Festival in Matera – and have been using the internet as a new best mate. So far I have found many contemporary writers to be generous and supportive human beings – I hadn’t realised it would be like this.

3. Do you have a typical writing day? If not, when is the best time to write for you?

To write I need to know that I have empty time ahead. That can mean a week or so for a story, or big slabs of relatively empty weeks for a first draft or novel revision. I work as a translator and also teach English and during the day my house is quiet and empty, so at the moment I am able to organise my time – but it hasn’t always been like this!

I love writing in my room which catches the winter sunlight all day long. Or during the summer away from my family in the cool ex-dairy. I am horribly disconnected when I work – I drink coffee and forget to eat, occasionally wandering down for piano practice or to bring in yesterday’s washing. I don’t think I am much fun to be around.

4. What made you decide to write ‘The Divorced Lady’s Companion to Living in Italy’?

‘The Divorced Lady’s Companion to Living in Italy’ by Catherine McNamara
To published by Indigo Dreams Publishing U.K. June/July 2011 http://thedivorcedladyscompaniontoitaly.blogspot.com

One stinking hot summer after several years of living in Italy I was drinking vodka with Emily who said ‘Why don’t you write something set in Italy? Something funny?’ At the time I was depressed over a heavy and traumatic fiction novel of mine set in Ghana (now I have distance!) and had published a couple of short stories after getting back on my feet following the return to Europe (as a single Mum with a batch of tri-national kids). It’s true, I needed lightness. But I had never felt the remotest connection to Italy except for a vague ire over the way women are treated here – botox and silicone, cut-off age twenty-eight. But I do like humour, although I wasn’t sure about lightweight romance. Driving back from Treviso I thought of a name, a first sentence, and spent the rest of the summer/autumn/winter writing the novel. Thank you Emily!

5. What are the best things about being a writer?

I still get that hit when I think I have written something flawless. Of course that often turns around and you get the cringes. But reaching the end of a piece, feeling you have found meaningful resolution with moments of grace or even power along the way, it’s one of things that makes me feel I have found an explicit and satisfying use for my brain. And then when one receives praise or encouragement, it’s quite massive.

6. And the worst?

Without a doubt the waiting. The rejection. The fragility this all entails. The illusion that you are doing something useful or marvellous when in truth, you are not. Sometimes I do wish I had found this level of satisfaction in doing something a little easier. Slowly, I am learning how to move from the private to the crueller ‘public’ world of measuring writing.

7. You’ve also written a collection of short stories. What was your inspiration for these?

‘Pelt and Other Stories’ by Catherine McNamara (http://peltandotherstories.blogspot.com)

Though my childhood was settled I left Sydney at twenty-one and moved around quite a lot. From Paris I moved to Milan, learnt two languages, went to Somalia as a young diplomatic wife ill-equipped for warfare, went to Ghana where I ended up living local life to an intense and unexpected degree. It feels as though I have lived several different lives and the stories carry a lot of the spill-over. Things that I have seen or imagined very easily work themselves into new, fresh stories in my head. It always starts with a sentence, then I love imagining a character, an environment, issues and plot resolution. This year I have started to have write my first stories set in Europe – I am fascinated by migration, the overlapping of cultures and also by how nature works upon the psyche of man, particularly in a mountain environment.

8. Tell me about what you’re working on now.

I am very keen to participate in the promotion of ‘The Divorced Lady’s Companion to Living in Italy’ which is being published in June/July 2011. I am more than grateful to Ron Goodyer and Dawn Bauling of Indigo Dreams Publishing U.K. for selecting the book and giving me the chance to have an entire novel with my own name. So far even the most ardent non-womens’ romance readers have been very positive and I am hoping that it might do well with a wider public.

Participating in the Women’s Fiction Festival in Matera may have opened some doors with the short story collection and I am waiting on replies, writing more short stories in the meantime. I am trying to formalise my swing between writing stories set in Italy and Ghana, which often hinge upon migrant workers, expats or accidental travellers like myself. I would also like to get back to my depressing, huge African novel which is really a beautiful, trapped love story.

9. Do you have a dream project you’d love to write?

If ‘The Divorced Lady’s Companion to Living in Italy’ goes well I would love to write a sequel. I think I would enjoy thrashing out the sequence following the book’s conclusion. It could be hairy but hilarious. There are several characters who I have fallen in love with – Brett the bi-sexual benefactor from Hong Kong, flighty Australian Fiona who cannot be trusted, Estelle the insouciant Latvian waif model, Marilyn’s very punky British teenagers in preppie Milan, and of course Marilyn and her lovers.

And of course every writer’s dream project would be writing a screenplay and selecting a top-notch cast!

I would also like to write a full-on chunky literary novel along the lines of the short story collection. Having a novel published makes one want to grow quickly and make use of all those ideas.

Thanks to interviewer Paola Cecchetto (for press release 2011)