Will I Get “Talented Mr. Ripley”-ed in Italy?
A travel announcement which may mean my own untimely demise.
I am not a traveler. Before this week, I had left the coastal United States exactly once: I went to Toronto, which is a two-hour flight away, and I was only there long enough to walk around the block, give a speech, and order one very exotic Canadian coffee.
This is the week everything changes. This is the week that (assuming I don’t get hit by a bus, or get COVID, or get involved in an air crash somewhere over the Atlantic, in which case this post will read pretty morbid after the fact) I go to Italy.
My books sell very well in Italy. This is a strange, but pleasant, fact. You know those jokes from the 1990s about how Germans went nuts for David Hasselhoff? Or how the French actually found Jerry Lewis funny? That’s me, but with Italians. Americans look at me and see someone melodramatic and temperamental and riddled with Catholic guilt, and the Italians are like, “yes, that is a normal man. We’ll have more of him.”
So, this week, I am going to ruin all that goodwill by actually going to Italy, to a series of events. I’ll be in Rome. I’ll be in Milan. I’ll be in Naples. I’ll be in a whole lot of incredibly beautiful places, some of which contain the Pope, and these are, for the record…
