Rebecca Serle Met Her Mom’s Old Boyfriend, Then Wrote a Best Seller

MAMMA MIA What would you give to have the ability to spend time together with your mom as a younger girl, earlier than life’s obligations and turning factors landed with a thud on her shoulders? In “One Italian Summer season,” now in its fourth week on the hardcover fiction listing, Rebecca Serle immerses her protagonist on this fantasy. The circumstances are bittersweet for Katy Silver, who proceeds with a long-planned trip to the Amalfi Coast after Carol, her mom and meant touring companion, dies of most cancers. There, within the foyer of her lodge in Positano, she runs right into a 30-year-old incarnation of Carol.

Serle’s mom may be very a lot alive; in reality, Ranjana Serle just lately shocked her daughter in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., on the final cease on her e book tour. However “One Italian Summer season” has a again story that’s partially grounded in actuality, Serle defined in a telephone interview. “In the summertime of 2019, I went to Rome after which Positano with my mother. She had hung out there after her second 12 months of faculty; she had fallen in love and had this magical summer time. She had at all times, at all times talked about this time.”

Whereas they have been touring, the Serles tracked down Remo Pizotti, Ranjana’s long-ago Italian boyfriend, and organized to satisfy him on the Trevi Fountain. “They acknowledged one another instantly, which was so candy,” Serle stated. “They noticed one another and embraced and he introduced my mom this appeal that stated ‘love’ on it that she had given him virtually 50 years beforehand.” With the assistance of Google Translate, the trio chatted at a espresso store that was as soon as the bar the place Ranjana and Remo first crossed paths.

Serle defined that her mother and father have been married for 40 years, and that her father endorsed this reunion regardless that it happened on his birthday. When she and her mom stated goodbye to Pizotti at a bus cease, Serle glanced again and seen him watching Ranjana stroll away. “It was very candy and likewise a bit unhappy,” she stated. “It obtained me occupied with the ladies our moms are earlier than we meet them. There are moments in life should you’re a author the place the second is simply shrieking at you to concentrate. I knew I needed to inform a mother-daughter story and this one type of laid itself out for me.” (No spoilers, however Katy and Carol spend time with a heartthrob named Remo.)

In one other meta-twist, the audio model of “One Italian Summer season” is learn by Lauren Graham, whose “Gilmore Ladies” character, Lorelai, Serle quotes in her epigraph. The passage contains this sage maternal recommendation: “Get a window seat, honey, ’trigger there’s a lot to see.”