Then, once I was walking, I had the urge to skip, to go faster, to confront more challenging terrain. I wasn’t thinking of a future objective, because the effort of trying to walk was so overwhelming. When I was taking my first steps in Italian, all I wanted to do was learn to walk, as it were. It’s as if I were writing with my left hand, my weak hand, the one I’m not supposed to write with.” Could you have imagined then that you would ever be comfortable enough in the language to write a novel? In an excerpt we ran in 2015 from your essay collection “ In Other Words,” you describe the moment when you found yourself first writing a diary entry in Italian: “I write in a terrible, embarrassing Italian, full of mistakes. You’ve been writing in Italian for several years now, and you wrote the novel in Italian, under the title “ Dove mi trovo,” and then translated it into English. The story is adapted from your new novel, “ Whereabouts,” which will be published in April. I discovered it when I was living in Rome, and I began writing this piece of fiction there. It probably grew out of my frequent crossing of Ponte Garibaldi in Rome, the bridge that takes me from Trastevere and leads to the Jewish Ghetto on the other side of the Tiber, where there is a library, housed in the Centro Studi Americani, that I love to work in. Your story in this week’s issue, “ Casting Shadows,” opens on a bridge in an Italian city as a woman and a man meet.
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