I’m a novelist who will go anywhere and talk to anyone if it helps me tell a better, more complete story. Usually, I work alone, but when I traveled to La Maddalena, Italy to conduct research for my new novel, The Half Life, I asked my mother and three adult siblings to join me.
I was writing about a community of Americans living on a Sardinian island in the 1970s. My family had lived there when I was a little girl, with the exception of my baby sister Eve, who was born a few months after we returned to the United States. During the Cold War, the U.S. Navy moored a submarine tender — capable of repairing and resupplying nuclear-powered submarines — in the La Maddalena Archipelago, and between 1986 and 1988, my naval officer father worked in the tender’s supply department.
