Andrew Sean Greer

So enjoy your artichokes until radicchio happens.

In Venice, there is a radicchio festival for the tardivo, which means the final radicchio.

Okay.

And everyone celebrates, sadly, the end of radicchio, because then comes potato.

Potato's good too.

Well, I imagine when she was very young, it was a sort of... It wasn't a way to amuse herself.

It was a way to make her life possible.

And now I think it is not to sit in bed and just watch television at the age of 92, but to have...

crisis after crisis that she causes herself so that even there's a death in the novel and there's great grief around it until suddenly she decides it has to be a caper and that they have to steal the urn just because

life's better that way yeah you know it's funnier and if it's funnier then she feels like she's she's bought some more vibrancy one of her i guess missions in this book is to turn to make the protagonist less american which i thought was very funny

Well, because as an American, I can say we're used to things happening by app.

or um order online or these kinds of things or irregularity in like the way plugs function in the wall or the way a toilet might flush or a sink might work we think it's all going to happen just like you buy it at ikea yeah or ikea as they say in italy and um it isn't so there there is a personality to everything and an irregularity that shows the human quality of everything

that exists.

And so I think becoming less American isn't necessarily becoming Italian.

It's letting go of all those ideas and accepting that Amazon isn't going to arrive at your house.

You have to send it to the hair salon where the woman used to work.

You know, like something complicated.

And I've certainly had to do that.

It is nice, though, that Italians find an American accent charming.

Not sexy.