Jane: [00:00:00] Hello, welcome to historical happy hour, the podcast that explores new and exciting historical fiction novels. I’m your host Jane Healy. And in today’s episode, we welcome acclaimed author Crystal King to discuss her latest novel in the Garden of Monsters. It was it’s a Goodreads most anticipated historical fiction novel for fall.
And it’s been called a sinister romance and hypnotic gothic fairy tale. Welcome, Crystal. Thank you for doing this. Thank you for having me. I’m super excited to be here. I have so many questions. I’m going to do a quick bio about you and then and then we’ll jump in. So Crystal King is an author, culinary enthusiast and marketing expert.
Her writing is fueled by a love of history and a passion for the food. Language and Culture of Italy. She has taught classes in writing, creativity, and social media at Harvard’s Extension School, Boston University, Mass College of Art, UMass Boston, and Grub Street. A Pushcart nominated poet, [00:01:00] so impressive, and former co editor of the online literary arts journal Plum Ruby Review, Crystal received her MA in Critical and Creative Thinking from UMass Boston.
Her previous novels are A Feast of Sorrow and The Chef’s Secret. Welcome again. Thanks again for coming on. Thank you. So I wanted to, I love this book. It’s so interesting. It’s such an interesting premise. And I obsess over author notes. So I love the origin story for this novel, which, there’s a mutual friend mentioned in the origin story.
Talk about this premise and how you ended up writing in the Garden of Monsters.
Crystal: For those of you who are not familiar with the publishing world it’s a weird one. And sometimes you can sell books and sometimes it’s harder to sell those books, even if you’ve got books that are out. And so I had a historical fiction novel that I was trying to sell in 2020 or 20, yeah, around [00:02:00] that time, 2021 really.
During the pandemic and the publishing industry was in a strange place. And my the renaissance book about a about essentially a meat carver to one of the Cardinals and the renaissance, which just wasn’t selling. And I was really bummed about this. And I had another book that was set in the Baroque era that were about an obscure steward.
And I thought if they’re not going to read the renaissance book they’re not going to read the book. For broke books so I was talking to our mutual friend, Chris Walter and she has this she’s an author actually, she’s the creator of the goddess tarot, which is one of the best selling tarot decks in the world.
But she’s also a novelist, and has a book called the law, the secret history oh gosh I’m not I’m missed the Lost History of Dreams. That’s it. And also she has this wonderful book about the women of Frankenstein, unnatural creatures. Yes. Yeah. And that book had just come out [00:03:00] and I was like, I want to write something that’s going to sell.
What can I write that will sell? And she said gothics are hot of course, because she just wrote this gothic masterpiece. So I thought my, if I thought to myself, if I were going to write a gothic, What would I write? And the second I thought that, that garden that I had been to two years before, before the pandemic hit came to my mind.
This incredible place, an hour outside of Rome in a town called Bomarzo, Italy. And it is a, Renaissance garden that was created in the 1500s, late 1500s, and it was overgrown for almost 400 years. And in the 20s, 30s, 40s, all these surrealist artists started going there because it was weird. This garden is full of stone monsters and there’s all these crazy statues.
The centerpiece statue is this guy, this ogre or oracle. And and it’s on the cover of the book, yeah, [00:04:00] and there’s actually a table inside his mouth. You can walk into the mouth of this statue, of this creature. He’s called the Orko, which is Italian for ogre but it’s considered to be the mouth of hell.
And then I started thinking that’s interesting, plus there’s this Palazzo, this old rambling castle basically on the hill in this medieval town that the town just tumbles down the hillside beyond the castle, or Palazzo, I should say. And I thought that’s, this has just got all the makings of everything Gothic.
But then, I started looking at what’s in, thinking about what’s in the garden and getting out my maps, and there’s a statue of Demeter that looks right toward the mouth of hell, and there is a bench of Persephone. And then there’s a proserpina, which is the Italian name, and Ceres, which is the Italian name for Demeter.
And Pluto is Hades. There’s also Cerberus and all these other gods and goddesses. There’s Poseidon and Ares and just all sorts [00:05:00] of like statues in this garden. And I thought, that’s it. I’m going to retell this story. But then the kicker is that Salvador Dali was one of those artists that went there and he went there in 1948 and I thought, okay, this is how I’m going to do this book.
So it’s told from the point of view of a model that Salvador Dali brings to this garden of monsters in 1948 Italy.
Jane: It’s so unique. Yeah, the whole premise, and I love of course, I love historical fiction, but this is, an aspect of history Salvador Dali and that whole area that this Garden of Monsters, I’d never heard about at all and I encourage everyone to go to Crystal’s website, because your research was extensive I want to back up and say that, so this, you decided to do a twist on it.
the love story between Hades and Persephone. We were just talking about this. So tell everyone like what their story was in a nutshell, if you can, and then and how [00:06:00] you made a modern day retelling of it in this gothic novel.
Crystal: The myth of Hades and Persephone it’s not actually a Greek myth.
It’s a Sicilian myth. Hades lived in Mount Adna. And Persephone was Demeter’s daughter, and you have to also remember all these Greek gods were brothers and sisters, and Demeter is Hades sister but he, and he, Hades sees Persephone gathering flowers at the base of Mount Edna, and he decides that he wants to marry her, so he asks Zeus, can I have this girl, and Zeus says, sure, go for it, And so he takes her and in most of the myths it’s a forceful thing.
And of course, certainly, of course, all the Renaissance paintings, there’s a sculpture by Bernini in the Villa Borghese in Rome. That’s the Rape of Proserpina, where Hades is forcefully taking her down into the underworld. And it’s called the Rape of Proserpina. And then, There’s a lot of stories about her being forcefully [00:07:00] taken.
There are some myths, however, even back that far in ancient times that she comes to love him or decides to stay with him. But what happened is that Demeter was so bereft. She was absolutely just lost that her daughter had been stolen from her. And she wandered the world looking for her.
But then she decides she can’t find him. Or she understands that she’s been taken into the underworld. So what she does is she blankets the earth with snow and pills, basically all the crops, the animals start dying. The people start dying because they’re starving. And Zeus says, this cannot work.
And so you need to figure this out. You can’t, Hades, you’ve got to let her come home. He had. So Hades was like, I can’t let her go entirely because she’s eaten from the underworld. And in some of the myths, it’s three pomegranate seeds, but in most of them it’s six and in my story it’s six pomegranate seeds.
And [00:08:00] She the compromise is that Hades gets to spend time with Persephone or Persephone in the winter time. And so when that is happening, Demeter has blanketed the earth with snow. In the spring, Demeter is getting excited that her daughter is coming home. Summer is when she’s able to come back into the overworld and then fall there.
She’s becoming sad that she’s going to go back down into the underworld. And so that’s the story of the seasons. And so it’s always been a mother daughter story, a very traditional mother daughter story. But then over time, and particularly in current times, it’s become this incredible love story. And most of, a lot of the retellings you see now tend to be romance stories or love stories between them.
And I went that route. There is a very strong love story here, but there’s More than just one love story going on. And I can’t really tell you how I subvert the myth, but it’s not the myth you just heard. It’s similar, [00:09:00] but really different. And it’s also set in 1948 and Salvador Dalí, so it’s weird.
There’s some weirdness and ghostiness and strangeness and
Jane: We don’t want to give away any spoilers. But yeah, it’s really interesting. I was thinking when I was reading it about the musical Hadestown. Yeah, it’s so good. And yeah, I was like, oh, it’s, Hades is having a moment. Talk. So like I said, your research for the story was extensive and you have an amazing website.
Clearly you have a marketing background to talk about your research and your deep dive into all of this history and and what your process was. And did you come across any surprises that changed the narrative?
Crystal: This one was interesting because I’d been to the garden once and then when I was writing the book, the Pandemic I had just started writing it right after the pandemic.
It was the first thing I did when I emerged from it with a vaccine in my arm. And I went [00:10:00] on a writing retreat with a few other authors and started this book. But a lot of the research that I was doing before I got to that moment was during. COVID and I can. One of the things that was hard was that I couldn’t go into the Palazzo until after the book was already.
Written and editing. The first time I was in the Palazzo was this last January. And I only got to see a small part of it because only a little bit of it was open. So I had to rely on a lot of photos. And video of the Palazzo itself. But fortunately I had been to the garden once. I was able to go again.
Actually I did go. While the book was still in, in the working phase, the editing phase. So I was there in 2022 and I was there again in 2023. And fortunately my editor right after she acquired the book, like the week after she went to the garden, she was going to Italy and she made a detour to go there.
So that was really nice. So she understood the story and could work with me on [00:11:00] Formulating my vision because she had seen it. She understood it. And what was interesting about it is that on the cover, you can see that the eyes have these it’s very like stylet stylized. And in the garden itself, like it’s the these eyes don’t have anything in it.
They’re holes except For the 500th anniversary of the creation of the garden by Vicino Orsini they put glass eyes with these, like those same, it’s the same thing. So she took a photo and that’s what we took for the cover. So that was cool. But I read tons of books, so many books. I talked with some historians about the garden itself and what the statues all mean and what they, the structure of the garden and that kind of thing.
And I read so many books about Salvador Dali and watched a million videos about him. To really get a sense of who he was. I read his autobiographies, which are weird, and he would have been canceled so fast. And [00:12:00] so how did I, that was also a challenge. How do I portray this very problematic individual who was also very charismatic and was a genius.
He was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. Of the literal, probably the last couple hundred years in some ways. And so how did I, how could I. portray him in the right way. So there was a ton of research in that
Jane: regard. That’s so funny. That was actually my next question because, and I use the word, I’m like Salvador Dali was problematic as a person, like not a really, not a great guy, a narcissist, more than a narcissist.
Yeah. And his wife was a piece of work as well. Gala. Is it Gala? Pronounced Gala? He called her Gala.
Crystal: So a lot. Okay. Okay. But it’s like gala is like how it’s written. She’s Russian. So he was definitely a narcissist. He was in for shock and awe. That was his whole modus operandi.
Everything he did revolved around getting attention. And that was from very early on. [00:13:00] He was also somebody who was a racist. He was kicked out of the Surrealists because he had written a letter to Paul Hulard that described a religion that excluded Black people. He also was an admirer of Franco and of Hitler.
He later in life, I think in the 60s or 70s maybe, he did a painting of Hitler mass raiding. You don’t actually see it, but it’s clear what’s happening in the painting. And in a lot of my research, one of the things that, I struggled with is like, how do I talk about this person?
He’s, Somebody that I don’t think he wasn’t somebody who was interested in Nazism or he wasn’t interested in what Franco’s Policies were anything like that what he was interested in was the idea of how much power they wielded That’s what he was interested in. He was a narcissist beyond any Absolutely everything else.
And that’s what fueled [00:14:00] everything he did. And that, and the kind of people that he admired as well. He also admired Freud and and Picasso. And he created this, if you look up the Google painting of his picture of Picasso, it’s a weird painting and like it’s like partially of a woman and if I’m remembering correctly the Picasso’s chin, it doesn’t look like Picasso at all by the way, but the Picasso’s chin is these flattened pancake breasts of some woman it’s like just bizarre and Picasso hated it and never talked to him afterwards.
So like he was just in to shock absolutely if he could shock you he would. I wonder what he thought of Madonna, because she, he was still alive when she took the, to the stage. But yeah, he was wild, but to talk about Galah briefly. So history has a real sense of like, how do we look back at history and the women that have been maligned by history?
How do we make them into how do we tell their true stories? Gala’s story is she was mean, she was nasty, [00:15:00] and there’s stories of her hitting people at parties, she was ruthless about how Dali would make money she was not faithful to him and he knew this, he sanctioned this, he was a voyeur and that worked out really well because he didn’t really want to touch people but he liked to watch, and so Gala had all of these lovers, and he would watch just, and in fact, so much so that he bought her a castle when she was like in her 70s or 80s, so that she could entertain one of her paramours, who was the young actor that was in Jesus Christ Superstar in the 70s. And he could only visit the castle if he had a written invitation from her.
Jane: Dolly could only visit if he hadn’t written an invitation.
Yes, correct. Fascinating. Yeah, wild. Just so weird couple. Yeah. Yeah. So I definitely, I feel like you captured them. They, yeah, they were a little, they were more than a little odd. Yeah. Food. is an important aspect to the story as it has been your other novels. And I want to, and I was just, we were just talking [00:16:00] before this started.
If you go to Crystal’s website and you sign up for a newsletter, you’ll have access to the three cookbooks that accompany each of her novels, which I thought was super cool. I love to cook. I love food. Talk about how you incorporated, you talked about these amazing dinners and how you incorporated food into this particular story.
Crystal: Yeah, so my first novel is about an ancient Roman gourmand who was a lot, who was really real. His name was Apicius, and he died in a messed up way, so I tell the story of how he got there. And my second novel is about a Renaissance chef who was the, a celebrity chef in his time, and he wrote a cookbook that was a best selling cookbook that published in 1574, but it was best selling for almost 200 years after he died.
And he was chef to several popes and cardinals. And so during my research of those two books, I learned so much about food history in Italy in general, just tons of things. Mostly because in those eras, particularly in ancient Rome, what we know are snippets of things. And so it tends to be those [00:17:00] eras tend to be mentioned in compendiums of Italian food history.
So I learned a lot about. food across the eras. And so that served me well when I got to this book. And so this particular book is not about a culinary figure, but there’s food involved because she has to eat six pomegranate seeds. And in my story, she needs to eat them. And or at least my characters believe that she needs to eat them.
And I have to have some feasts that some pomegranate seeds show up in. And so I got to play upon the food history and that I had researched and learned over the years. So there’s, for example, there’s a feast, a medieval that comes from the medieval novel. Called the Hypnerotomachia Pamphili, which is a story of this man named Polophilio.
And he has this wild dream of him trying to get back his lover who has left him. And so in this book, there’s this feast of like many [00:18:00] courses and every course the food is a different color and The servers change colors if they’re, of the tablecloths and their clothing and it’s a big visual spectacle.
So I have lots of that kind of thing. So It’s fun and super, super cool to go that route. And then because I want to find out what those foods taste I try a lot of recreating of those. My husband is a, he loves to cook and I love to bake, so that works out really well. And then for the cookbooks, I worked with these food histo I worked with food historians, food book bloggers, and some chefs to recreate these recipes.
And if so it’s great, like if you have a book club and you want to read the book, you can also cook all of the food which is super fun. Do you have a favorite recipe from this novel? I do. It’s the recipe that shows up on the very it’s like the second sentence of the book. First part of the book like I’ll read it to you because it’s oh, yeah
Jane: Yeah,
Crystal: it took me years to [00:19:00] find Julia Farnese, but no time at all to win her confidence I did so with an unassuming cherry rose tart And I had to figure out how to make a cherry rose tart.
And so I did and it’s so good It’s oh, I can eat it every day My life and be happy. So yeah, and that so and that recipe is actually in the back of the book When you buy it.
Jane: Oh, okay. I’ve missed that somehow. Okay.
Crystal: Oh, it’s probably not the one you have because you have an arc. This is the arc.
Jane: Yeah.
Yeah. So how was it? This isn’t, your first two novels were really food centric. They, and centered around a person who was involved in the food world, even though it’s historical fiction. But this one is, this gothic re imagining of Hades and Persephone. How was that for you?
Like to do something really different than the first two novels?
Crystal: It’s
Jane: so
Crystal: historical fiction, and you know this because you write historical fiction. You’re connecting the dots between what you know and what you don’t know. So you get to filling gaps. You’re just [00:20:00] filling in gaps in a timeline for the most part, and putting some emotion behind the things that occurred, and giving color to factual events.
In this book, the only, there’s only a few factual events that really, The factual thing is the garden exists, and I try to stay true to the layout of the garden and why the garden was created. I take some liberties with Julia Farnese, who is the wife of Egino Orsini, who created the garden. But I don’t have and I have to get some things right about Salvador Dalí and his character, and his history.
And I do make some nods toward the future. So for example, I talk about one of the meals in the book is from his 1973 cookbook, which of course has not been created in 1948, but he’s talking about the vision of a cookbook. And so some of the recipes are his vision of in this book. And so that was hard because I had to make it all up in a way that I’m just not used to doing for novels.
And [00:21:00] it was both freeing and terrifying. But it was good because it meant that I had a lot of freedom to explore the characters and the situations and to do things that I can’t do in historical fiction. Cause I believe in historical fiction, I should stay as true to the facts as I can, but this, I didn’t have to really do that.
Jane: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like you said that, the main, the Salvador Dali and his wife obviously were real people in history, but then you had a lot of leeway with the other, when you’re dealing with mythology. So yeah, so interesting. Another question I have the next few questions are writing questions like I always ask and and then we’ll take some questions if you want to put them in the chat or in the Q& A for Crystal.
I will field questions from the audience. You’ve also written poetry, which, like I said, I, so impressive at a high level. So do you have a preference between poetry and long form fiction? So it’s funny.
Crystal: I wrote mostly poetry for the first [00:22:00] I don’t know, 10, 20 years, maybe after I got out of school, mostly because I felt like I could finish it.
It, a novel seemed big. It seemed like, when would I have enough time to sit my butt in a chair for that long? That was, it just seemed like an insurmountable amount of time that I would have to spend on that. But poetry was compact, I could complete it and but what happened is when I started I went and got my MFA in critical and creative thinking, and my thesis was on creative writing exercises for authors in the middle of their stories.
Thank you. And I wanted to shop around a creative writing book. And when I started doing that, agents told me, no one knows who you are, so you need to either teach these stories, teach these exercises, or you need to write a book with these exercises, or someone else needs to write a book with these exercises.
And so I thought, Okay, I’ll start teaching. So I started teaching and then at some point I thought I should really write the book [00:23:00] because I want to sell this other thing, but once I did that, I am my all my energy went into that. I haven’t really written much poetry at all in the last probably 15 years.
But I love reading it. I really do. appreciate it on a level. But it is something I know that I will go back to at some point.
Jane: Yeah, I’m sure. Cause it was, it sounds like it was your first love, your first foray into creative writing. Yeah. I’m always impressed with poets. I don’t know how you do it.
What let’s, in terms of long form fiction novels this is a question I always ask. What’s your process? Are you a plotter? Do you plot, or do you write by the seat of your pants? Are you a pantser?
Crystal: So for those of you watching I attended an event this weekend in which Jane was moderating for Greer McAllister.
And Greer was saying how she plots it and then abandons it. The whole time I’m in the audience, I’m just shaking my head. I’m like, that’s exactly what I
Jane: did
Crystal: because I will plot it all out. Spreadsheet that I with [00:24:00] historical fiction, it’s a little bit different because you’re working with timelines.
And sometimes you have to figure out, can I, what do I need to figure, get in the timeline in these chapters? But that’s I started that same process here and I abandoned it halfway through. But when I start to run into big problems that I just can’t solve, I will go back. And try to at least, if I don’t plot it, what I’ll do is I will write summary, handwrite, just like free write summaries of the chapter.
And just get it all out. And what do I want to have happen? Not necessarily the story itself, but just summarizing the plot points of it. And sometimes that helps. I’m a bit of a pantser plotter. Hybrid. Hybrid planter . Yeah. Got it. .
Jane: What is some of you, this is your third novel you’ve also written poetry you’ve taught writing.
What is the best advice you can give about writing and about getting published? I know we have a lot of aspiring authors in the audience.
Crystal: So I wrote my first novel on weekends. It took me four or five [00:25:00] years basically, but I did it on weekends here and there. I was not. I was not consistent at all.
But one of the things that happened is I fell in love with writing books and especially with my second novel. And I thought this is really what I want to do with my life. Someday I’d love, I have a day job. because it makes me more money than I can make as an author at this point in my career.
But one of the things I figured, if I want to be a career author, there’s two, either two things have to happen. Either I have to be lucky or I have to be prolific. And I don’t have control over lucky, but I have control over prolific. And I believe enough in my talents that I don’t have to worry about that as much.
I think I can write solidly. So prolific is what I focused on. And the only way you can be prolific is to just sit your butt in the chair every day. And I have made a pact with myself to try to write at least 400 words a day or edit for an hour a day. So I spend every morning for an hour before I do any, before I do anything else [00:26:00] really.
I get my coffee and then I start writing. And then that if I can do that consistently, I can write a book a year. And what The reason why I bring this up, because not everybody thinks like they can do this every day, but the reason I think consistency matters is because the book lives in your head and it, your characters start to breathe when you’re sleeping and when you are doing random things, you’re, you can think about your book and have conversations with those characters in your head in a way that you just can’t when you’re not consistent.
This is why you keep hearing the advice. It’s from a lot of very famous authors. Stephen King is a big proponent of every day you need to sit your butt in the chair and you need to write. That’s why. It’s because the way that your characters talk to you is just completely different if you can do that.
In 400 words, it’s two pages. So
Jane: that’s true. That’s a lot. It’s good advice. And I think too, like when I’m working consistently on the [00:27:00] project, that’s when your subconscious kicks in. So I’ll be driving in a car or taking a shower and I’m like, Oh, that’s how I fix that. Or that’s what happens next year.
And I think that’s really true. If you’re only like dabbling here and there, you don’t get that momentum. Yeah. I Totally agree. I talk to myself
Crystal: a lot in the car, actually. Yeah,
Jane: yeah. I’ll dictate into my phone, said you could talk a little bit about what you’re working on now.
Crystal: So I have a book that’s coming out right now.
I think the date is like December next year. And it is, we’re working on the title, so I can’t talk about that because I’m not 500 percent sure on the title yet. But it’s a story about nefarious gods stealing happiness from the world. And they’re Greek gods, but they’re really obscure you might not have ever heard of them.
And it’s contemporary. It’s set in 2019 right before the pandemic. And it’s a total swerve. It’s not historical fiction. It’s a, it’s not, there’s no food in it. It’s a very [00:28:00] different story than what I was doing previously, but there is some history in it because my character is a historian.
And the thing, what part of her job is to go to different historical places in Italy and and record them as a historian. So there’s lots of Italy in the book and lots of, and there’s a lot of London in the book. And there’s a lot of history, but in real small bits and pieces, not, it’s, I wouldn’t call it historical fiction, but I can’t let the histories totally slide.
Jane: And that’s already written. You’re done with that. Yeah,
Crystal: we’re in edits right now.
Jane: I’m
Crystal: in edits, I should
Jane: say. Amazing. Good for you. Congratulations. That is that’s a lot of work between this and this one coming out.
Crystal: Yeah, my editor was like, can I have edits by October 1st? I’m like,
Jane: Oh, yeah, we negotiated to October 15th.
I think I’m good. That’s good. That’s good. I should mention this comes out September 24th. Talk about this very cool, unique cover because I see covers all the time. And this one I was like, Oh, [00:29:00] that’s really different. I love this. Did you have a say in the design or? I did.
Crystal: Oh, nice. But the good thing was is when they brought me back the idea of the design like, like they brought me back the first parts, like the first ideas, I was like, Oh my gosh, this is exactly how I pictured it.
Awesome. What we did is we talked about like comp covers, what books in this genre do I like? What kinds of like styles do I like? What are my colors that I like? Originally this cover was red. Cause I like clearly like a lot of red and it was super cool. But then when the sales team saw it, they were, they looked at it and said, this looks like a Chinese dragon and it might not send the right idea of what the story is about.
And I looked at it like a Chinese, food, joint kind of thing. And I looked at it, I was like, yeah, that’s totally what it looks like. So we shifted to the blue and and it worked out really well. And especially cause you still have the pomegranates. If you notice there’s six seeds in all of the [00:30:00] pomegranates too.
Jane: Oh, so clever. Yes. And then of course didn’t. I was saying I didn’t even see the monster face until the other day. I was like, oh, that’s what that is. Okay. . And
Crystal: originally she was she had a 1940s dress on, but it made her look too much like a little kid in the, ah, the doorway. So we went with the Greek chiton instead just because it just made more sense for understanding what the story was without by just looking at the cover.
Jane: Awesome. Yeah. And if anyone has questions, put them in the chat or the Q and A for Crystal. I always, I’m really into movies. I want to ask, is there any movie interest and who would play doll, Dolly and who would play the main character, Julia, his muse?
Crystal: Gosh, what’s her name? So I’ve been, we’ve been, my husband, I’ve been talking about this cause I’ve been getting this question.
He thinks Jake Gyllenhaal would be a great Dali. And I at first wasn’t entirely sure, but then he started showing me [00:31:00] pictures of him like next to Dali. And I was like, okay, I could see this transformation, whether or not he could pull off the accent and stuff like that. I don’t know, but. But he would be interesting.
And then Emma Emma Stone, no, Elle Fanning. Elle Fanning. Oh, yes. Wait, the Fannings, I get confused. Oh, Elle
Jane: is the younger one.
Crystal: Elle is the youngest one.
Jane: Yeah. And Dakota
Crystal: is the older one. I think Ella Elle would be a great Julia like that is the kind of like she, cause she’s a blonde model. She’s young.
She’s like that to me, like she could be like a really great Julia. I don’t know who would play Galah or the other characters. I haven’t really thought too much. Oh, he did have an idea of Jack. Who did he have for Jack? It was somebody that I’m not remembering off the top of my head, but at first I was like, I don’t know about that.
That’s not who I have for Jack. So it’s funny. It’s like when you first hear the audio book for the first time, the audio book is [00:32:00] so weird to listen to because it’s like somebody else wrote the story and not you. Same kind of thing. I imagine it’s the same because what other people’s ideas of it are never going to be exactly the same as what I had.
And I remember when I first heard the audiobook for Feast of Sorrow, one of my characters is a big beefy Egyptian bodyguard and like huge guy. And he did the voice for him and I just started laughing, I’m in the car by myself listening to it laughing hysterically because it just wasn’t what I didn’t have an idea in my head what he sounded like, but that just wasn’t it.
It turned out I fell in love with the story and he made, he did an incredible job on that audio book, but yeah, it’s the same kind of thing. I can’t,
Jane: I’m not sure who else should be. Because they’re in your head as who they are, right? Yeah, it’s hard to know. You’re, it says, there’s a question here from Graziella Machetta.
Oh, Graziella is,
Crystal: Un buon amica. She [00:33:00] is one of my Italian tutor. And
Jane: oh, so lovely. So she says, Hi, my brilliant friend. Can you tell us anything about the etymology of the name Barmarzo?
Crystal: Oh, I don’t actually know that. Now I’m going to have to look that up. I just, I actually don’t know the etymology for that.
It’s in the Tuscia region, which is, like I said, an hour north of Rome. It’s near Viterbo. And Capirola. Capirola is a city that where Cardinal Farnese had his palazzo, and that’s originally where I went, and the driver said, Oh, there’s this crazy garden. You want to go check it out? We’re like, Okay. But the Capirola has a pentagonal palazzo in it that is the design, it’s the inspiration for our pentagon.
Jane: Okay, I was thinking what’s the closest place to the garden, like, where would you stay if you were to see this garden what’s the closest town? You can stay in Palazzo. Oh, you can?
Crystal: Yeah, you can actually stay in the [00:34:00] Palazzo. There’s a, there’s some, a couple B& Bs in the Palazzo, which I have not done, but.
Jane: Nice.
Crystal: I don’t think it’s as ghosty as my story is. I don’t know, but it’s old. It’s from the 1500s. So it’s a cute little village. It’s very medieval. It’s just a sleepy town, not much going on. And yeah, it’s, and it’s very old. Like it’s a, it’s I would say most of the buildings are between 1100 and 1500s when they were built.
So
Jane: how often do you get back to Italy? I know you’re a huge. Once a year if I can. Yeah. Nice. Nice. Good for you. That’s amazing. Yeah. This was delightful. Thank you so much for coming on, Crystal. And I’m, I wish you so much success with the launch next week in the Garden of Monsters. Tell people how they can get, keep in touch with you.
And and what, and how, as particularly if they want you to Zoom with their book club too. What’s the Best way to get in touch. Yeah,
Crystal: so you can find me at crystalking. com and that’s you can sign up for my blog there, my sub stack. [00:35:00] I also have, which is free by the way, a lot of sub stacks want you to pay and I don’t ask for that.
If you wanted to be a patron, I would not complain, but and then I’m also on threads and you can find that link on my site as well and on Facebook and on Instagram. And then you can also download my cookbooks. The other thing that you can also do on my site is I have two pages dedicated specifically to the store, the places in my garden and the people.
So there’s a page just on the Sacro Bosco garden, which means sacred wood. And then there’s also, you can see all the pictures of all the statues and everything, which is wild. It’s so cool. You just won’t check the. Check that out. And then there’s a whole page on Dali and all of the weirdness that was Dali and Gala.
And so you can check that out as well.
Jane: Yes. Such a cool website filled with like I said, you can tell you’re in marketing because the website’s excellent and I, everyone should go check it out. And you can also sign get, there’s a page for book clubs there as well. Oh, perfect.
Excellent. Thank you again. This was delightful. [00:36:00] And this will be recorded. I will send you the link so everyone can watch it, everyone who missed it tonight. Next month for Historical Happy Hour, I have a huge busy October with Linda Loigman, Joy Jordan Lake, Emily Bleeker, Samantha Woodruff, and Tosca Lee.
And you’ll get invites. MailChimp if you signed up for my mailing list, or you can go to janehaley. com to register. Again, best of luck. So lovely to talk to you, Crystal. I wish you, I hope the book soars. Congratulations. You too. Take care. Have a good night, everyone. Thank you. Bye bye.
