No one ever finds this house the first time they look for it. There is a little set of stairs on Via Capriglia between the wall of one house and the garden fence of another. There is a gate at the bottom of the stairs so that it looks like you shouldn't go down there.

But the gate, which is not locked, opens up into a green courtyard garden and that's where our house is. One side of the grassy, flower-filled courtyard opens out to a view of the sea, but the other three sides hold four houses. Ours is the one closest to the sea and with the best view of it.

The neighbors are all very friendly and kind, which is good because we are very much aware of each other during the day -- when and what we are cooking for our meals, who has gone out to the beach or the market, when the children are getting ready for a bike ride. Yesterday, while I was making lunch, someone had their radio on and Edith Piaf was singing "La Vie En Rose."

I like having people around and think of it as "Catfish Row" from Porgy and Bess, only Italian. It's nice to feel everyone going about their business here. Somehow, it makes things seems more tranquil than even if we were all alone.

I have been working this week on the final edits from the publisher for Armadillo Massacre Number Three. They are very light (thank god), but they are not non-existent, so I put aside the new novel that I've just started in order to work on them.

I hope the new novel will be funny. I'm turning all my friends down at the pub into a gang of assassins. They are all very much on board with this idea and read each section as I finish it (I run it through Google translate for them) and make suggestions for what happens next. Whether it will ever actually turn into a book or not, I have no idea. But I am having fun playing with it.

Jonathan is back in school at Pisa now and has very long days there on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, so I plan to use the time and the solitude to get my life in order and start exercising and organize my paperwork and read improving books and start publicizing Armadillo and finish all the art projects I have in mind and just in general become a complete saint. Wish me luck!

 I started working on a new novel on Sunday. Just now, I came across this story in today's Guardian.

This is a picture of my spice cabinet's current state. I feel that the gods have spoken.

(p.s. When I showed Jonathan the headline, he laughed and laughed. "Well," he said, "they've got you pegged.")

 

So, I have this newsletter that I'm sending out. It fills me with shame, but what are you going to do? Here is the latest utterance. If you want to get them fresh out of the hopper, just let me know by emailing me at AskTheArmadillo@ proton.me

Hi, everybody –

How are you all holding up? It seems like a lot of us are trying to balance being at least minimally well-informed about the horrors that our governments are committing in our names and not becoming so overwhelmed by our grief and our rage that we can’t function. It’s a hard tightrope to walk sometimes.

And escaping into a good book for a while can provide much needed rest and reinvigoration. Literature can change us as we read it and can become a part of who we are. So when The Guardian published a list of “The 100 Best Novels of All Time” two weeks ago, it is not surprising that it became a viral hit, with people flooding the electronic waves to agree, disagree, discuss, poke fun at, and in general do all the entertaining things that people do from the quiet and anonymity of their own couch. The link to the list is here:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2026/may/12/the-100-best-novels-of-all-time?lid=9v1n4cszeo8g

But for me, the question of “best book” is like the question of favorite color or favorite song. Favorite for what purpose? The song that I want to hear when it’s 2 a.m. and I’m missing people long gone is very different from the song that I want to hear when I’m cooking dinner (if we do, in fact, want to be able to eat the dinner at some point) or when I’m out dancing.*

So the idea of “best,” for me at least, begs the question “best for what?”

It seems to me that in these days of grief and rage, we have certain needs that certain books may address and that others, no matter their individual merit, may not be suited for. The number one book on The Guardian list (spoiler alert!) is George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

I love Middlemarch. It is one of my favorite books and George Eliot is one of my favorite authors. But Middlemarch, which may for all I know indeed be the best novel ever written, is not the book that I myself need in these days.

So I have made my own list:

The Twelve Best Books for 2026 (And May God Have Mercy on Our Souls)

Number 12: The Once and Future King by T.H. White

From the back cover: “The magical epic of King Arthur and his shining Camelot; of Merlyn and Owl and Guinevere; of beasts who talk and men who fly; of wizardry and war. It is the book of all things lost and wonderful and sad.”

Why I chose it: It’s good to think about leaders who have honor and of ideas of honesty and decency among the powerful. It’s good to think about what really makes a hero.

Important line: “[Arthur] was only a simple and affectionate man, because Merlin had believed that love and simplicity were worth having.”

 

Number 11: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

From the inside flap: “A dark Faustian parable of science misused.”

Why I chose it: The Creature, in all his humanity, reminds us that we are all born with the capacity for great good and that it is circumstances and the cruelty of others that can make us into not what we want to be, but what we ourselves are sorrowful to see.

Important line: “For a long time I could not conceive how one man could go forth to murder his fellow, or even why there were laws and governments; but when I heard details of vice and bloodshed, my wonder ceased, and I turned away with disgust and loathing.”

 

Number 10: The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

From the back cover: “In a series of brilliantly plotted episodes, Bertie and Jeeves help Bingo Little with his love life.”

Why I chose it: Technically, this isn’t a novel, but a set of connected short stories. But I don’t care. Sometimes, we just need some joy. As Christopher Buckley said, “It is impossible to be unhappy while readings the adventures of Jeeves and Wooster. And I’ve tried.”

Important line: “‘My God, man!’ I gargled. ‘The cravat! The gent’s neckwear! Why? For what reason?’”

 

Number 9: Wind, Sand, and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

From the back cover: “The exciting realism of air adventure… combined with lyrical prose and the soaring spirit of a philosopher, makes these memoirs one of the most popular books about flying ever written.”

Why I chose it: Again, not a novel. Again, I don’t care. A memoir about the author’s days as a pilot flying the mails in the earliest days of commercial aviation, this is a book about people who do things well – with bravery and with care. In our world of AI slop and fake-it-til-you-make-it, it is important to celebrate, with gorgeous prose if possible, people who never took a short cut, but did their very best, without fanfare, even when no one was looking.

Important three paragraphs: “I remember, once, a homecoming of Bury, he who was later to die in a spur of the Pyrenees. He came into the restaurant, sat down at the common table, and went stolidly at his food, shoulders still bowed by the fatigue of his recent trial. It was at the end of one of those foul days when from end to end of the line the skies are filled with dirty weather, when the mountains seem to a pilot to be wallowing in slime like exploded cannon on the decks of an antique man-o’-war.

“I stared at Bury, swallowed my saliva, and ventured after a bit to ask if he had had a hard flight. Bury, bent over his plate in frowning absorption, could not hear me. In those days we flew open ships and thrust our heads out round the windshield, in bad weather, to take our bearings: the wind that whistled in our ears was a long time clearing out of our heads. Finally Bury looked up, seemed to understand me, to think back to what I was referring to, and suddenly he gave a bright laugh. This brief burst of laughter, from a man who laughed little, startled me.

“For a moment his weary being was bright with it. But he spoke no word, lowered his head, and went on chewing in silence. And in that dismal restaurant, surrounded by the simple government clerks who sat there repairing the wear and tear of their humble daily tasks, my broad-shouldered messmate seemed to me strangely noble; beneath his rough hide I could discern the angel who had vanquished the dragon.”

 

Number 8: Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood (usually published these days along with The Last of Mr. Norris in one volume under the combined title of The Berlin Stories)

From the back cover: “A charming city of avenues and cafes, a grotesque city of night-people and fantasts, a dangerous city of vice and intrigue, a powerful city of millionaires and mobs – all this was Berlin in 1931, the period when Hitler was beginning his move to power. … It is art alone, the art of an extremely gifted writer like Isherwood, which makes these often comic episodes tell us truth about the tragedy of Germany which cannot be found in any history book.”

Why I chose it: It is good to remember that we have been here before.

Important line: “Eventually, we’re all queer.”

 

Number 7: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays by Albert Camus

From the back cover: “With lyric eloquence, Albert Camus brilliantly posits a way out of despair, reaffirming the value of personal existence, and the possibility of life lived with dignity and authenticity.”

Why I chose it: I swear that most of these books are, in fact, novels. But not this one. Again. But the six pages of Camus’s short essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” can save us from our own despair.

Important line: “There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.”

 

Number 6: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

From the back cover: “Their Eyes Were Watching God is a celebration of black folk culture, of love between equals, of a woman’s self-discovery.”

Why a chose it: It’s important to remember the small victories of our lives – victories of managing, in spite of everything thrown at us by the world at large, to find ourselves and to know ourselves.

Important paragraph: “Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.”

 

Number 5: The Animal Family by Randall Jarrell

From the back cover: “This is the story of how, one by one, a man found himself a family. Almost nowhere in fiction is there a stranger, dearer, or funnier family – and the life that the member of The Animal Family live together, there in the wilderness beside the sea, is as extraordinary and as enchanting as the family itself.”

Why I chose it: For all of us strange outcasts out there, alone and different, it is good to know that love can make a family, and that we can always be our true, wild selves with people who love us.

Important line: “The hunter and the mermaid were so different from each other that it seemed to them, finally, that they were exactly alike; and they lived together and were happy.”

 

Number 4: The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf

From the inside flap: “In Spain lives a big and strong bull whose name is Ferdinand. Unlike the other young bulls, Ferdinand does not like to fight. He would rather sit in the shade of his favorite cork tree and smell the flowers.”

Why I chose it: Is it a children’s book or a metaphor for the power of peaceful passive resistance and the story of a very effective sit-in? Maybe we should all be like Ferdinand and refuse to comply with cruelty and violence and warfare.

Important line: “His mother saw that he was not lonesome, and because she was an understanding mother, even though she was a cow, she let him just sit the and be happy.”

 

Number 3: The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

From the  inside flap: “Hawthorne’s great Puritan novel of sin and regeneration observes the consequences of adultery for three people of superior consciences: a passionate young woman, Hester Prynne; the father of her child, Arthur Dimmesdale; and her aging husband, Roger Chillingworth. Each has been marked by sin in a different way. Hester, publicly confessed and shamed, is spiritually ennobled. Dimmesdale, too weak to reveal himself, is ravaged with self-torment. And Chillingworth, wronged and secretly dedicated to vengeance, is transformed into a monstrous being.””

Why I chose it: Although being force-marched through this book in high school English classes (when, frankly, none of us has had enough life experience to even begin to understand what this book is about), nearly ruined this book for me, now that I’m older and have more life behind me, I understand Hester Prynne as one of the most powerful female figures in American literature. In these days of attacks on female bodily autonomy, it’s good to remember that Hester, not the feckless Dimmesdale or the malevolent Chillingworth, is the one who ultimately triumphs.

Important line: “And, once, Hester was seen embroidering a baby-garment, with such lavish richness of golden fancy as would have raised a public tumult, had any infant, thus apparelled, have been shown to our sober-hued community.”

 

Number 2: Silas Marner by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)

From the inside flap: “When his precious money is stolen and, shortly after, seemingly and mysteriously replaced by the child Eppie, Silas is awakened to life by the redemptive power of love.”

Why I chose it: Another book foist upon unprepared high school students that rings much deeper when you’re a bit older. The greedy, deceitful, and cowardly Cass family don’t get what they want in the end. They find out, indeed, that you can’t buy real love, no matter how much money you have. A truth that lives through the centuries.

Important line: “‘I can’t feel as I’ve got any father but one,’ said Eppie, impetuously, while the tears gathered. ‘I’ve always thought of a little home where he’d sit i’ the corner, and I should fend and do everything for him: I can’t think o’ no other home.’”

 

Number 1: The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

From the back cover: “There are a few stories that in some way, in some degree, change the world forever for their readers. This is one.”

Why I chose it: It is an antidote for everything wrong with this moment in time. That’s all.

Important line: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

 

So that’s it – my own little list of books that might help in this moment. You probably have others. Send along suggestions for additions to the list to AskTheArmadillo@proton.me and I will include them in future newsletters as a way of helping each other make it through these rough times. They won’t last forever. And the first person to send me a suggested book to add to the list will get a lovely Ask The Armadillo t-shirt. Suzanne already got hers and sent a picture of herself wearing it. She looked beautiful – but that might be more about her soul than her clothing, as is often the case.

Take care everyone.

Love, Kathy

 

* There was a place on the road in Rarotonga where, driving along in our car twenty-five years ago now, we would come out of a patch of cool seashore forest and the wide sweep of the bay would open out in front of us, a thousand shades of fractured blues and greens, like the pieces of a constantly shifting kaleidoscope, appearing and disappearing endlessly into pure light, while my sons, aged seven and four then, chatted to me and to each other in the back seat, and the road unspooled in front of us going nowhere, and at night we all slept in our one airy room in Emily’s house and the boys held hands in their sleep and the palm trees made their curious rattling sound and the ghosts of Emily’s ancestors watched over us and kept us safe. So I guess that is my favorite color. But whenever I’m buying shoes, I always find myself drawn to red.

Luciana reports that someone else is living in our old house now and, although she has seen them at a distance once or twice, she has not actually met them. I thought I would be sadder about leaving that house than it turns out that I am. My boys never lived there with me, so it is just a house, no matter how beautiful.

The other house was dominated by the woods and the gardens and terraces and by the house itself with its secrets and its magic. Here, the new house is dominated by the enveloping view of the sea and, most of all, by the sky. Jonathan and I call out to each other, again and again, from wherever we are in the house, "Look at the sky! Look at the sky!"

I am spending my days doing little things to prepare for my book launch -- trying to lay the groundwork for getting some publicity, building my "brand," which is what everyone must have these days, they say. Up until now, my brand has been "old lady farting around in Italy while eating too much and drinking wine," but that won't cut it anymore, they say. I have to actively engage with an enthusiastic reader base, they say. I must flog the merch, they say.

William Faulkner never had to prostrate himself to the malevolent gods of social media, I say.

You're no William Faulkner, they say.

 We usually end up stopping by our old house for some reason or other every day -- today it was to pick flowers and put out the paper recycling. But it is very quiet and still there now and the rooms echo when we walk through them. We live among our half-unpacked boxes at the casa campanile now.

I am in the throes of doing the advance publicity for Armadillo Massacre Number Three. In furtherance of that, today I was standing at the kitchen stove in full armadillo costume making a blackberry cobbler while Jonathan filmed me. I looked out the open kitchen window and the neighbor's gardener was standing in their yard staring at me.

"Buon gionro, signora," he said and nodded.

"Oh, buno giorno!" I said, all perky. And then we both went back to what we were doing. Tonight he will tell his wife what he saw at work today and she will perhaps accuse him of starting his drinking too early in the day.

Dear everyone --

I'm starting an email mailing list in the lead-up to the release of Armadillo Massacre Number Three. There will be giveaways of books and merch, sneak peaks, videos, recipes, games, trivia contests with prizes, and whatever fun things occur to me in the dark hours of the night. 

If you would like to be on the list, just email me at kathygiuffre62@gmail.com and say "I'm in!" 

This will be fun! Love and kisses, Kathy

 

Jonathan has been gone all week visiting his parents in New Jersey. I have been here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea living in the winter wind and the air that is washed clear and the sea that glows like a pale blue pearl.

I am supposedly working on some of the pre-publication tasks for Armadillo Massacre Number Three. People are surprised that it takes so long to bring a book out, but I feel like I have so much to do and so little time to do it. There was a big zoom meeting last Friday night of all of the authors in our "season" -- Fall 2027 -- with the publisher. 

Now we are busy grouping up to make book tours together -- arranging readings, signings, panel discussions. I am in both the North Carolina group and the Colorado group. There are lots of dates to coordinate and bookstores. etc. to contact. And, of course, we are reading each other's manuscripts, so I have like 10 books to read in the next few weeks.

But there is also paperwork -- my very favorite thing. Multiple questionnaires to fil out with questions that require actual thought: "Who is your ideal reader?" "What is the number one reason booksellers should stock your book?"

I have no idea. With the world both literally and figuratively on fire, I don't know why anyone would do anything rational and calm.

I got an email this morning from a friend in the US who wrote: "Things are heavy. I'm weary of marching, signing petitions and screaming into the void. Yet we must carry on. ... I'm not sure my nervous system was meant for this."

We also feel that way, even here. During my Italian lesson yesterday, we spent half of our time discussing whether the demented orange madman will start World War III over Greenland. It's all so unbelievably insane. And yet, I fill out my little forms and send my little emails. I take showers and brush my teeth and still make the bed every morning and continue to eat kale -- just as if I think the world will wake up from this nightmare one fine morning. Maybe it will.

 

The winter flowers are out on the hillside now -- pale green hellebore and white daffodils. The holiday festivities are almost over now, although we still have the Befana celebrations on Twelfth Night.

We went to New Year's Eve dinner here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea where a big celebration had been organized at the empty school house. This was the first time that this had happened and there was a story in the local paper about it saying that the "old people" in Capriglia were gathering together to do this. Jonathan and I had been part of the planning of the event from the very beginning and were unaware that we are explicitly among the number of "old people" up here until we read about it in the paper. It was literally news to us.  But, honestly, we fit right in and weren't even the youngest people there -- although not by much.

The cuisine of Italy has just this past month been recognized by UNESCO as an important part of world cultural heritage (the first country to have its cuisine named by UNESCO) and the local grandmas who cooked the meal were absolutely proving it. 

So we ate until midnight and then watched the fireworks twinkling down on the coast below us. From up here, it looked like fireflies in the summer woods.

Mimmo gave us a precious bottle of local olive oil -- the supply this year is very limited because of the bad harvest. This year's vintage is being called Palle Verdi -- "Green Balls" -- which is slightly obscene in English, but not in Italian, where the slang for testicles is "scatole" -- "boxes" -- not "balls." So there's a piece of useful and important cultural knowledge that you can keep on hand for your next trip to Italy.

We are not in our new house yet, but -- much like the raffle drawing for the giant wine bottle at the pub or, for that matter, my Italian citizenship -- we have high hopes that it will happen very soon.

In the meantime, I am keeping myself busy by trying to come up with ideas to promote Armadillo Massacre Number Three. This week I made bookplate stickers that have my recipe for fried catfish on them. Fried catfish are an important part of the book -- an explicit ingredient of Heaven. I realized, when thinking about this, that it took me a whole 60,000-word book to say basically the same thing that Henry David Thoreau said in just one sentence: "Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads."

 

One of the nice things about being a grandparent is that now I can do fun things for my grandson that I thought about doing for my sons, but never did because I was too busy actually, you know, parenting them.

So during these past couple of weeks, I wrote a very silly book for my grandson called "Muffin and the Circus of the Sun" that stars a little hedgehog named Muffin along with other characters like the Later Gator and the Gift Horse and some very nice Dingbats.

For $11, there is a company in the US that is printing my book and binding it nicely and shipping it to my grandchild who can't read yet, but maybe will one day.

So that is what I did with the first half of December and now it is one its way and I am free to fall into all of the holiday festivities -- markets and concerts and dinners and parties. Today's festivity is a General Strike all over Italy that means the trains aren't running and our paper recycling wasn't picked up this morning. So that is festive, but in a different way from the choir concert.

Now that the cold weather has come, the air out over the sea is crystal clear and we can see all of the individual houses and gardens down on the coast and even across the bay to the headlands at Porto Venere. The evening air often smells of woodsmoke and the only birds are owls and the sunset over the sea is the color of rubies. The leaves are falling every day and we can see down into the valley behind us now to the lights of Solaio. Late at night, wolves howl and the sound echoes around the valley forest.

We bought a two-foot-tall plastic Christmas tree at the big supermarket out on the highway and installed it in the living room. I thought that having at least a few of our old family ornaments hanging on it would make me feel more like it was Christmas. But now that it is up, I realize that I miss the smell of the fresh-cut fir trees that we used to have every year, hiking up into the high mountains and tramping through the silent snowy forest to find the one we wanted. We brought thermoses of hot chocolate and hot apple cider and scrambled eggs and bacon wrapped in tortillas and Christmas cookies. 

We always decorated the tree right away when we got home and the whole house smelled like the snowy winter forest. I will go out later and cut a pine branch or two from our woods and bring them into the house for the sake of their perfume. But I know that it will not be -- could not ever be -- the same.

Because there is a fried catfish motif running through Armadillo Massacre Number Three, I have made a new trailer based on that theme from an idea Tris came up with. The only problem was finding catfish and buttermilk, neither of which are readily available in Pietrasanta -- or even in Italy in general. For the catfish, I substituted the fish in the grocery store that looked to me most similar (it turned out to be plaice). 

And for the butter milk, I thought, "Well, we'll just make it ourselves." For my entire life, I have been under the impression that buttermilk was the milk left over after you churn cream into butter.

So we bought three half-liters of heavy cream and dutifully churned it into butter, carefully saving the leftover milk in a big bowl. When it was all done, I got set up to film and then while I was waiting for Jonathan to be ready, I gave the buttermilk a little taste -- just out of curiosity and to make sure it was right.

So do you know what is left when you churn butter out of cream? Not buttermilk, that's for sure.

It's skim milk. Just plain skim milk.

So at that point, I looked online to see how to make buttermilk. It turns out that buttermilk is a cultured product produced in a similar manner to yogurt, but using a different culture agent. All of the recipes for making it yourself begin with, "Take two tablespoons of buttermilk and add them..."

But if I already had access to buttermilk, why would I be making it myself? In the end, we stirred in a couple of spoons of plain yogurt to the milk and carried on. The end product was tasty nonetheless.

But now we are left with a giant ball of butter as big as a baby's head. We used some of it to make cookies and I also made a concoction of butter, honey, cinnamon, and cloves that we are eating on Jonathan's homemade bread. I've had worse things in my mouth. But we still have a lot of butter to go.

And now the finished product. 

I was a little shy about traipsing through the Piazza del Duomo dressed as a giant armadillo, but no one paid much attention to me and the two workmen carrying lumber up the side street who chatted with me seemed to find the whole thing rather charming. 

I was glad we finished filming before the big group of German tourists showed up, though. One does not want to be so colorful as to show up on strangers' vacation reels.

The third draft of my memoir is sitting quietly marinating for a while so that I can come back to it with some "objective distance." Fat chance.

But, in any case, I am using my free time since I am not working on it (and since the chestnut butter days are now behind us) to work on some promos for Armadillo Massacre Number Three. Last night, we shot some footage in the pub. Did I ever imagine my life would end up this way? Um, no.

 

Autumn is here now and I startled a beautiful deer in back of the house yesterday when I went out to hang up the laundry. It was a lovely dappled brown and black and it disappeared into the woods immediately.

The chestnuts have started to fall and so have the corbezzoli berries. The porcini mushrooms are still going. I am making plum jam later today, but chestnut butter is on the immediate horizon and corbezzoli jam after that. The air is cold in the mornings and very clear so that we can see the individual windows on the houses down on the coast. The sea looks smooth and burnished in the sun.

Daniele and Alice have decided to start a line of their own wine at the pub and Daniele asked me to design the label. (At first he hired an actual professional designer, but he didn't like anything the designer came up with and I happened to be sitting around drinking wine with the boys at the time, which is how most things happen to me. That has been true my entire life. Being underfoot has worked out well for me as a life strategy.) I did about four designs and they chose the one with the green door, which will be a good souvenir of the place. So I have, at long last, come into my true calling. Jonathan and I are anxiously waiting for the labelled bottles to appear. The naked bottles are already there and Daniele gave us one to take home to "inspire" my drawings.

I also made another book trailer. These are much easier to make than the actual books themselves are.

After a full week of trying my best, Goodreads still refuses to acknowledge that the author known as Kathy Giuffre is me and Facebook refuses to acknowledge that I am a human being at all. It's disheartening.

On the up side, the boys at the pub are teaching me to play scopa, the rosemary in our garden is flowering and I'm having fun making promo trailers for my book. Here is the one I made this morning:

Regal House Press has a very thorough and extensive (139 pages) Author's Guide that they sent me once I had signed the contract. It is supposed to help me work through the process of having my book published. It is basically a 139-page (single-spaced) To-Do List with headings like "Obtaining Copyright Permissions: Written Works" and "Obtaining Copyright Permissions: Song Lyrics." Take a tip from me: never quote song lyrics in a book you write. Trust me.

I started with the section called "First Steps" because I am a methodical kind of girl. Yesterday, I worked on First Step #3: "Do you have a fully developed author profile on Goodreads?" and First Step #11: "Have you joined the Regal Author Community on Facebook?"* I started with Goodreads, thinking that would be easy.

But no.

Goodreads informs me that although there is clearly an author named Kathy Giuffre, they don't believe that I am her.

It is unclear why they don't believe this. I can't imagine that there is a hot global market in Fake Kathy Giuffres with people paying big money to nefarious Russian cyber-criminals to pretend they are me. I can more easily imagine people paying to ensure that they are not accidentally mistaken for me. But here we are.

But while Goodreads was irritating, Facebook was existentially devastating. They say that they don't believe that I am human at all. That really hurts.

My numerous attempts to prove my humanity were so unsuccessful, in fact, that I inadvertently angered the Facebook gods and have now been told that I am prohibited from trying to prove that I am human ever again. That is, quite frankly, not how I thought things would end up when I started my day yesterday morning. No one expects that.

So I am making vegetable soup and hoping the internet eventually forgets that I exist.

It is very quiet in the house just now. The birds seem to have gone further south since autumn has come. The mosquitos, alas, have not followed the birds and, in fact, have taken full advantage of the recent rain to breed like rabbits and rampage around in giant clouds of ravening bloodsuckers. At night, we scratch ourselves and listen to the owls (the only birds left, it seems) riot in the woods.

Jonathan goes three days a week now to the University of Pisa where he is enrolled in law school. This was an unexpected summer development, sparked by a casual comment made by the official Italian translator while she was officially translating some of my citizenship documents into official Italian. And, since this is a civilized country that recognizes the benefit of having an educated populace, higher education is fantastically cheap (especially compared to the exorbitant cost in the US) and readily accessible. Jonathan just had to prove that he has an undergraduate degree -- which he does -- and then he started going to classes ten days ago.

The best things (besides the actual education and fascinating information gleaned, of course) are that 1.) he takes his bike on the train with hm and then bikes past the Leaning Tower of Pisa on his way to class every morning, and 2.) in one class there is only one other student and Jonathan is older than the student and the professor combined.

I am still riding the incredible high of having my novel under contract with a publisher, which really says something given that I spent the day yesterday changing all the n-dashes in my manuscript to m-dashes and reformatting my paragraph indentations. Today I begin my dance with the endlessly fascinating Chicago Manual of Style. It has hidden depths.

So many hidden depths.

But I also made a book trailer. It can never be used because I don't have rights to the music. But I went ahead and did it anyway just for the fun fun fun of it.

My novel, Armadillo Massacre Number Three, has won the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction and will be coming out from the amazing Regal House Publishing, one of the best presses in the US, in Fall 2027. I can almost not believe it.

I got the email while we were sitting in the departure lounge at Dulles Airport waiting to fly back to Italy. At first, I kind of couldn't take in the email -- I was just sort of confused by what it seemed to be saying. Then the light dawned and I started to cry sitting right there in the middle of the crowded airport. (For the record, no one around me even batted at eye. Except, of course, for Jonathan.)

My friend Jessy says I should have gone and had myself paged: "Will Kathy Giuffre, award-winning author, please pick up a white courtesy telephone for a message..."

It has cooled down a bit (low 80s) and I am able to sleep now and, as a consequence, think consecutive thoughts again. 

I have changed the title of my finished novel to "Armadillo Massacre Number Three," for instance, and decided that if it ever gets published, I am going to immediately start lobbying for it to be made into a big Broadway musical along the lines of "Little Shop of Horrors." 

Since there are armadillos in it and since the narrator of it is dead and speaking to us from the afterlife, I think the musical version of it should have two choruses of background singers, like in Greek tragedies. 

One will be a group of singers dressed up as angels and the other will be dressed up as armadillos. I can just see the armadillos singing and dancing in step like the Temptations.

 

Eternal optimism is a beautiful hallmark of my character. In other words, I am a chump.

I have ordered a new bathing suit to be sent in the mail in preparation for the summer. I had to order it online to be shipped because the style of bathing suits around here -- every single one, no matter how grandmotherly and modest is the rest of the suit -- is to have only a thin string of dental floss going up your butt, leaving the rest uncovered. Now, I make no judgements about the amount of butt that other people choose to exhibit to the world. You go, girl. But if I were to wear such a suit, I would spend the whole time trying to pick that bit of string out of my butt crack. And I just don't think that would be attractive.

So I ordered this new bathing suit and crossed my fingers that my friends at the Post Office would somehow allow it to come to our house here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea -- perhaps in a moment of inattention. I am following its progress very closely. So far, it has gone to Milan, then to Rome, then back to Milan again. It is now at Milan Malpensa Airport (MXP) -- the international airport in Milan, as opposed to Milan Linate, which is for domestic flights -- waiting to fly out of Italy to god-only-knows where. One thing about our mail -- it certainly gets to see the world. I will update on its whereabouts when/if I get news.

We continue to search for houses to buy. We were offered one that is about halfway down the mountain at a very reasonable price. True, it has no bathroom, but -- on the bright side -- it is surrounded by dense forest which could possibly suffice. We also have a lead on one that is next to the church almost at the level of the belltower. Jonathan thinks that this is a mark against it, but I think it would be lovely to be able to see straight into the belfry and watch the hunchback ringing the bells. Not to mention how much we would probably learn about the habits of bats.

We are going to help out a bit at the pub this summer now that it is getting close to the time when Alice's baby is due. We will be in charge of adding up all the bills and doing the money on nights when it is very busy and crowded. This will now make the second time in my life when I have ended up working in a bar just because I was around all the time anyway. The first time was in North Carolina at The Cave and The Drunken Spelunker's Guide to Plato is based on that. If I ever write another book about our time here (after the one that I'm currently writing about our first thousand days), I will call it Barflies in the Belfry.

 In the book that I am writing about our life here, I am calling the pub "L'Arcobaleno" -- "The Rainbow."