Alessandra Ranelli

And I left.

And the sun was rising.

And I wandered home.

I fell asleep and I slept four hours and I woke up with a champagne headache and the idea for a book.

So the very first draft of the book took me 13 months to write.

Now, at the time, I had just been fired and I assumed I'd been rejected from this grad school program I'd been working for years to get into because the acceptance date had come

And came and went and I didn't hear anything.

And I sat with the idea for a few days because I had never written a novel before.

Kept a blog.

I did live storytelling and wrote poetry.

And I did professional storytelling, but as a side project, never as a main source of income.

But I'd never written anything long form or that wasn't autobiographical in some way.

So after sitting on the idea for a few days, what I actually did was I called my father, who is an Italian American accountant, and he's very tough love.

And I said, I need you to sit down.

I have to tell you something and you're going to be mad at me.

He was like, oh, God, what did you do?

And I was like, everything's fine, but I need you to listen to the whole story.

And then, you know, I need your advice.

And then I said, there's this love hotel in Vienna that I went to the other night with a stranger.

It's fine.