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Juliet Grames: On Doing the Right Thing in a Broken World

Juliet Grames is the bestselling author of The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in Real Simple, Parade, and The Boston Globe, and she is the recipient of an Ellery Queen Award from the Mystery Writers of America. She is editorial director at Soho Press in New York. Follow her on X (Twitter), Facebook, and Instagram.

Juliet Grames

Photo by Nina Subin

In this interview, Juliet discusses the seven-year process of writing and publishing her new novel, The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia, her hope for readers, and more!

Name: Juliet Grames
Literary agent: Sarah Burnes, The Gernert Company
Book title: The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf/Penguin Random House
Release date: July 23, 2024
Genre/category: Fiction
Previous titles: The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna
Elevator pitch: In 1960, in a remote mountain village in southern Italy, a flood knocks down the post office and reveals a human skeleton in its foundation. Twenty-seven-year-old Francesca Loftfield, an American charity worker, investigates the corpse’s identity on behalf of a local grandmother, and accidentally unearths a dangerous history of missing immigrant men and clandestine mafia.

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What prompted you to write this book?

The idea came to me while I was researching my first novel, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna, about Italian immigration in the early 20th century. I conducted over 100 interviews with members of the Italian diaspora, and again and again I encountered stories of missing immigrant men—uncles or brothers who sailed away to America and were never heard from again. (In fact, I learned of two such tragic incidents in my own family.) Descendants are haunted by these disappearances for generations, never knowing if their forbears were victims of exploitative labor practices, organized criminal syndicates, or their own vices. I knew I had to write a crime novel about it.

I chose to set my novel not far from where my grandmother was born; Santa Chionia is located in the Aspromonte, the mountain range in Calabria that is home to one of the world’s most ruthless mafias, the ’Ndrangheta. The fascinating history of this secretive and mysterious region dates back to the time of Homer. The massif is made up of lush, impenetrable forest and eerie ghost towns that were forcibly depopulated in the middle of the 20th century, and contains isolated pockets where people still speak Byzantine Greek.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

The idea came to me in 2017, when I finished writing and sold Stella Fortuna, and here we are publishing it in 2024—seven solid years. During those years I published and toured for Stella and had a baby, both things that dragged out the writing process beyond the schedule I had been aiming for. However, that “dragging out” was a gift, I am convinced, in that it forced me to take extra years in reading, researching, interviewing, and composting my ideas. When I finally sat down to write the story, I was able to imbue it with much more richness of atmospheric and historic detail.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

The most interesting, and occasionally frustrating, conversation that has arisen out of this publication process is about genre positioning. Labels help publishers speak directly to a target readership, but they also instantly close off other readership channels. My first novel was mainstream fiction, and in publishing a murder mystery for my second novel I was conscious of the high stakes of convincing crime fiction devotees, who are deeply read and can spot hack-job genre tourism two miles off, that I knew what I was doing.

The flip side of the conversation, of course, is convincing mainstream fiction readers (many of whom self-identify as “literary fiction readers”) that it’s not beneath them to read a genre novel. A couple weeks ago I was visiting a bookseller friend in Maine and overheard him encouraging a customer to pre-order my book. “I’m sure it’s good,” the customer said, “but I don’t usually read that kind of book.” The bookseller replied, deadpan, “It’s a novel. You don’t usually read novels?” I usually find these genre questions amusing and intriguing, but that’s because I can draw on the hard-won wisdom of 15 years of experience as a crime fiction editor. I can see how they could be distracting, maddening, perhaps even ruinous to new authors. I always hope readers, and especially writers, open themselves to encounters with all genres—I personally draw craft and storytelling inspiration from reading across genre spaces and traditions.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

Please forgive the most cliché of possible answers to this question; it’s just the truth: the killer did not turn out to be who I thought it was when I started writing! Neither did the murder victim. It goes to show you even the most comprehensive outline only gets you so far!

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

For me, Francesca’s central conflict is how to do the right thing in a world where everything is wrong and broken. It grew out of the systemic hopelessness and powerlessness I know I and others have felt in the last period of vitriol politics, medical crisis, and infrastructural instability. I hope the novel inspires readers to consider further the question of how to keep igniting compassion and trying to effect goodness in the world when a ruling system seems unopposable. I also hope they just have a great time trying to crack the puzzle along with Francesca.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

So much of the publishing process is outside of your control. If you let the industry or the people within it determine your self-worth or the value of your art, that process will crush you. Pin your joy and creative satisfaction instead on what you can control: your craft. Success at writing is the act of writing itself. 


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