Posted on: Sunday, May 27, 2001
Trendy literary genre: Women finding new lives in faraway lands
By Ellen Hale
USA Today
MOUGINS, France — A fierce mistral was blowing from Africa and the bowls were rattling on the table, but actress, author and olive farmer Carol Drinkwater wanted to lunch on the terrace of her renovated villa here under the Provencal sun.
Crusty baguettes fresh from the local bakery were laid out, along with tissue-thin slices of San Remo ham and wedges of runny French cheese. A hearty salad was tossed, dressed in fragrant oil from Drinkwater's very own olive trees, and bottles of wine from neighboring vineyards were uncorked. The pool gleamed bright turquoise, the Mediterranean sparkled in the distance, and the sun beamed overhead.
It was like a chapter out of a book — her own, "The Olive Farm: A Memoir of Life, Love and Olive Oil in the South of France" (Overlook Press, $24.95; June). In it, Drinkwater chronicles the arduous but rewarding travails of buying and restoring a run-down farm in the south of France, and of the path to self-discovery that paralleled her journey into home ownership.
"It never in the world would have occurred to me to become an olive farmer, but it has given me a peace I never knew," says Drinkwater, 52, who starred in the popular TV series "All Creatures Great and Small." As she reflects, Quashia, the endearing one-toothed workman so vividly portrayed in her book and whose fealty carries Drinkwater through many a scrape, quietly constructs yet another stone wall.
If Drinkwater, who is British, has found happiness and love by moving to a foreign country and reinventing herself as an olive farmer — and surviving to write about it — then she has company, lots of it. In what may constitute a new genre of literature, or at least a new take on travel writing, a growing number of adventuresome women are switching on their laptops to turn their exotic experiences into reading material.
As many as a dozen such books, and perhaps more, are coming out in time for summer reading.
Partly, the trend reflects a new level of sophistication among travelers. "People don't just want to know where to go and what to do, they want atmospherics," says Constance Sayre, publishing consultant with Market Partners International. "Sure, it's armchair reading, but it's also just as likely to be tucked under the traveler's arm."
Escaping the humdrum
But mostly, the stories appeal on the basis of sheer fantasy: Forget the office, forget the job, move someplace romantic (and warm), buy an old villa, find love, eat great food, drink well.
"In a way, these are wish books. They are about women reinventing their lives in new countries, and readers are drawn to them as much for that as for the portraits of the countries," says Charlie Conrad, an editor at Broadway Books. "Half the people who read these probably never leave Tucson, Ariz."
Conrad would know. He was responsible for buying the paperback rights to "Under the Tuscan Sun," by Frances Mayes. The book, which came out in 1996, has sold more than 1.2 million hardback and paperback copies, astonishing the publishing world with its largely word-of-mouth success. Broadway has just come out with two more books by women that also are set in romantic foreign locales: "On Rue Tatin: Living and Cooking in a French Town" by Susan Herrman Loomis ($24) and "The Magic of Provence" by Yvone Lenard ($14). St. Martin's is touting "French Fried: The Culinary Capers of an American in Paris" by Harriet Welty Rochefort (St. Martin's, $23.95).
There is little doubt that Mayes' books (she has since written two more) created a coattail effect, giving other authors a strong tailwind and even prompting some to put pen to paper.
"I was about to give up and take up needlework," says Joan Marble, whose book, "Notes From an Italian Garden" (William Morrow, $25), follows the passion for gardening that eventually leads her and her husband to build a home in the Lazio countryside near Rome. Marble had gone through several versions of a book on her experiences of living in Italy, but it wasn't until "Under the Tuscan Sun" struck gold that a publisher finally bit. Even then, Marble had to put the word "Italy" in the title. (She had wanted to call it "A Corner of Etruria," the region where her villa is.)
When Loomis sent out a proposal for a book about her life restoring an old convent in Normandy, raising a family and opening a cooking school in her home, she didn't expect even a nibble. Within 24 hours after her agent submitted it, she had a bid. "Mayes," she says, "helped open up the genre."
Writing about life in a foreign county is not anything new. The travel adventure book has always existed in some form, and Peter Mayle cemented it as a literary fixture in 1986 when he wrote the phenomenally successful "A Year in Provence." Most of the books (including his new book "French Lessons") share a mix of common ingredients: sun, good food, good wine, quaint villages, charming old homes, local customs and zany local characters.
But where Mayle's books carried the cynicism of the ad copywriter that he was and the local characters bordered on caricatures (the unscrupulous real estate agent/contractor/workman), this latest twist embraces a new ethos. The women who write them — frequently of a certain age and often on the cusp of ending or entering a romantic relationship — aren't just experiencing a foreign land, they're examining their old lives, finding them wanting and diving off the deep end in pursuit of happiness. En route, they share the emotional trip with readers. (As well as tips: Often writings are peppered with recipes and menu suggestions.) The books are almost uniformly sensual, romantic and personal.
"Is this the new woman's book?" asks Lynn Goldberg, an independent book publicist in Manhattan. "It would appeal to a real sophisticated readership. I would never be caught dead reading a pocketbook romance, but I'd read these."
In "On Rue Tatin," Loomis, a cookbook author, puts readers right in the pebbled courtyard of her ancient timbered home in the pinprick town of Louviers. She details how her husband single-handedly restored the house, how they struggled to befriend citizens of the village, how she sometimes despaired of the teaching methods in her son's school (yelling at the students is considered "de rigueur") and even of her efforts to have a second child. Her own recipes, as well as ones from friends and village personalities, appear in each chapter.
"Everybody dreams of reinventing their life, and they want to know it can be done, even if they don't do it themselves," she ventures. "In a foreign country, you find out you can be just who you want to be. It's a kind of liberation."
Exotic and erotic
For San Francisco writer Laura Fraser, it was foreign travel — and the exotic, erotic affair that came as a result of it — that finally freed her battered ego from the ruins of her marriage and prompted her to write "An Italian Affair" (Pantheon, $22). After she came home one night to find her husband in the arms of a former girlfriend, Fraser took off for Italy, where she met a Parisian professor who became her "same time next year" lover for a series of idyllic rendezvous. The affair leads Fraser to restore her sense of self and rebuild her life.
When Drinkwater first saw her villa near this hilltop town outside Nice, it was so overgrown that she didn't know the acres of terraced land were home to a forest of olive trees hundreds of years old. In the process of shifting her life from England, where she was a successful stage actress, she "took on a French home, a French husband and two French children." And discovered her calling in life: olive oil.
But Drinkwater, an obsessive diary keeper, tells warts and all, including the constant financial struggles to buy the house and to hang onto it. Overlook Press already has commissioned a sequel to "The Olive Farm," which will explore Drinkwater's unrealized hopes of having children and embrace many of the colorful characters who populated the first.
Like any genre, such as legal thrillers, the market for women's foreign adventure books eventually will become saturated, Conrad predicts. Sandye Wexler, an owner of the Savvy Traveller bookstore in Chicago, sees hints this already is happening. "A lot of these books aren't getting the play they might otherwise get because there are so many of them right now," Wexler says. "Part of the problem is the 'me, too' aspect of them. Of being set in Italy, France or Spain."
But those settings, paradoxically, may be critical to establishing the sense of romance that readers want. And sun and food — especially food — say a lot about how people enjoy their lives.
"It won't work in Norway," confirms publishing consultant Sayre. "I can tell you, I don't read bad-weather books."
