Elena Bowes caught up with Anastasia Rubis, who goes by Stacy, the author of Oriana, a wonderful moving novel about the trailblazing Italian journalist, Oriana Fallaci. Oriana was an international superstar, arguably the best journalist in the world in the 1960s and 70s. She was a woman in a man’s world, which makes her accomplishments that much more impressive.
Christiane Amanpour said Oriana’s penetrative, fearless interviews with world leaders, as well as celebrities of the day, as told in her book, Interviews with History and Power, should be required reading for all journalism students. Another Oriana novel that Stacy loved is called A Man, about Oriana’s great love, Alexander Panagoulis, a Greek resistance fighter who died under suspicious circumstances. Oriana wrote the book in three years immediately following his death.
Below are some edited highlights from my conversation with Stacy Rubis. You can listen to the entire episode here on Elena Meets the Author or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Elena: I was just so impressed how fearless Oriana was when interviewing leaders of the day.
Stacey: Exactly. My favourite quote of hers is, ‘I’m not intimidated by anybody.’ If you read her interviews, she interviewed Colonel Qaddafi, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Yasser Arafat. These are people with guns and guards. They’re dictators and she just goes for it. She asks the most provocative, persistent, impolite questions and she’s not afraid to do that and I find that amazing.
I have a quote from you where you talk about your favourite Oriana lines: She said, ‘You must be joking’ to a dictator who lied in answer to her question. There were armed guards in the room. To Kissinger, ‘Unless I’m mistaken, you’re a very cold man, Dr Kissinger.’ And she prodded Gaddafi, ‘You don’t remember? You should.’ And then also to Gaddafi, ‘I want to understand why everyone dislikes you so much.’ Do you have a favourite interview?
The Kissinger one, but also, I really love the Golda Meir interview because Golda and Oriana really hit it off. She really respected Golda Meir. She met Golda in her home in Tel Aviv. It was a very simple home. The housekeeper had gone home. Golda served coffee and cookies and washes her own dishes. They had a serious conversation about peace in the Middle East, but then Golda opened up to Oriana as a woman about the heartbreak of her life. And it was basically that Golda was in love with the same man from the age of 15, and they married, and they had children, but Golda really wanted a bigger life on the world stage, and he wanted a quieter life.
And so that led to their separation. But Golda told Oriana that she loved him until the day he died. And I think that Oriana understood from Golda that sometimes love is not enough. That for a woman who has ambition, it’s really hard to make it work. And I think Oriana was already experiencing that in her own life, to meld the professional and the personal.
That was great aspect to your book, the conflict Oriana had forever, that she was this fantastic journalist, but she grew up knowing in Italy you had to be a wife and a mother, and take care of your husband, and have children, and no matter how successful she was, she didn’t have that.
She called it a full life that she wanted, which is family and a profession. She was born in 1929. So, she would be almost a hundred today and there weren’t many role models for women who were doing both. Succeeding at home, succeeding in the world. And that’s what I find so poignant about Oriana’s story. As tough as she was- she basically elbowed her way to the top of a male dominated field, she never went to university. she was born poor, she barely spoke English when she came to the United States – she made it to the point where Newsweek called her the greatest interviewer of her time. Dick Cavett introduced her on his show as a legend. She made it to the top, and yet, there was a price to pay for a woman of her generation.
As successful as the chain-smoking, gorgeous Oriana was, she struggled at love. She seemed to fall for the wrong men, men who were jealous of her success, until she met Alexander Panagoulas, a Greek poet and resistance fighter, ten years her junior. So, I’m guessing, that a lot of the love scenes in your book are based on Oriana’s memoir A Man?
The scenes are based on reality, but they’re fictionalized. I’m a big romantic, and I think Oriana and Alexander is one of the greatest love stories that we don’t know.
It has passion and politics. She was 10 years older than him. They lived in different countries. She was the powerful one in the couple. She was at the peak of her journalism profession when she met him, and he was just out of prison. He didn’t have a job. He didn’t have money.
Alexander wasn’t diminished by her success at all. He was so proud of her.
In prison, he read her books. He said reading her books gave him the fire and the courage to stay alive in prison.
And this is all before he even met her?
Yes. So basically, he fell in love with her by reading her books, and then when he got out of prison, by some kismet, some universal coincidence, she decided to go interview him. So, she left Italy and went to Athens on his third day of freedom to interview him. She stole the assignment from somebody else at her newspaper.
Where do you think she got her guts?
This is what kept me going on this project for, I don’t even want to tell you how many years I’ve been working on Oriana. She got her guts from growing up during World War II in Florence when the Nazis had occupied her city. Because her father was part of the resistance to the Nazis. And he drafted her at the ripe old age of 14 to help him carry secret messages for the partisans, carry a grenade in her bicycle basket, wrap little pieces of paper with code words in her braids, hide the newspapers that they were publishing.
She had to deal with German checkpoints at every corner of her city. She was afraid at first, but I think that all this fear kind of burned off her. Her father was a European socialist, and her parents taught her, Nobody’s better than you.
You don’t need to be subservient to anybody in power. In fact, you should be suspicious of them. So, all those things together gave her a kind of courage.
Can you talk about how her style of reporting was so revolutionary for the times?
So, let’s remember that Oriana Fallaci was self-made. She didn’t go to journalism school. She didn’t go to college. So, she was making it up as she went along. And she had a writer’s brain and a creative person’s power of observation. And she brought that to her journalism.
She was focused on character. She said she always viewed the people that she was interviewing as characters in a novel. So, she was looking for ways to portray them that spoke about them, whether it was a movement or a word they used or a way that they laughed or what they said about their family. She was always interested in the human element.
Tell us about your journey to get Oriana published.
Had I known that it was going to take me eleven years to write, research, and try to publish it, I don’t know if I would have done it. But I’m glad I didn’t know. This is my debut novel. I’ve written for the New York Times and some literary magazines, but publishing a book, especially these days, it’s really hard.
I wanted to traditionally publish, I hired a couple of freelance editors to help in my revision. I had some really good advice from a wonderful editor named Susanna Porter, who didn’t take on the book, but gave me really good notes.
And then I had two different agents. They couldn’t sell it. I was like, I’m not giving up. I had written about a woman who never gives up, so I couldn’t. I decided to just submit it myself to the very few publishers who would take unagented manuscripts.
Why did it keep getting rejected? I don’t get it. Your book’s so good.
Well, lots of reasons, but mostly because Oriana wasn’t well known enough. But that was the whole reason I wrote the book, to introduce her. There are so many women in history that we have forgotten about. I’m one of these women writers who wants to bring up these women in history that are under recognized.
Finally, I got an email from Delphinium Books and the editor of Delphinium loved Italians, spoke Italian, had lived in Italy, and was not afraid of the Italian factor of Oriana. A year later, it was published
Do you have advice to aspiring writers on what to do to get their book out.
You can’t give up. The rejections are not personal. I stopped taking rejection personally I just thought, okay, next, this isn’t the right place for it. Or it’s not the right person. I’m going to keep going. And of course, I wanted a big publisher, a big agent, but then I became very realistic and kept going down the line. I ended up with a small publisher. I think they’re fantastic for publishing what they like. They didn’t care that I didn’t have a social media, like a million TikTok followers.
They’re very real and very authentic. I’ve had to do a lot of promotion myself. I wrote the cover copy myself. I found the audio book publisher myself and the narrator. I take initiative. So here’s a real good piece of advice for writers trying to get it out there: don’t rely on other people. It’s your baby. Do the work, take control. Don’t give up control to anybody else.
That sounds like an Oriana piece of advice, too. She always had control.
And of course, don’t give up. It’s all about money and business.
Your book goes back and forth in time, starting with the year 1973 when she actually met Alexander. Was it hard to structure the book? Can you talk about how mapped it out?
I think structure is always hard. Initially, I had focused the book much more tightly on the love affair between Oriana and Alexander. And, the editor, Susanna Porter, said she really wanted to know how Oriana becomes Oriana Fallaci, the best interviewer in the world.
She wanted more on her career, how did she get there? So, this made me widen the scope of the novel. Instead of just the love affair, I introduced Oriana when she was at the peak of her career and then went forward through her three years of love with Alexander.
And I added childhood chapters. How she got her first job in newspapers? She lied and said she was older, and elbowed her way in. What were her first interviews like? She was sent to England to write about the debutante season, and she made (her article) satiric because she also practiced the curtsy and couldn’t do it and made fun of it.
So now I had all these chapters that were early in her life leading up to when she met Alexander but I didn’t want to wait till mid book to introduce him. So that forced me to go back and forth in time.
I think we writers think we have to have the right structure in the beginning. But no. I would say that you should just write, write, write. Get all your stuff down on paper. And then, as my late friend, Luis DeSalvo said, sit on the floor with all these printed out chapters and shuffle them around.
Use a scissors if you must. I think it’s good not to get too hung up on structure early on. I think it’s good to just keep writing. And then structure is something you see when you take a step back from the project and look at everything you have. And you’d be surprised that your book could work in many ways. There’s not just one correct way to put it together, the structure.
What are you working on?
I really love true life more than fiction. So, I’m writing another historical novel. I can’t say that much about it, but it is going to be based in Greece again, a place that I know well. And it’s going to be a moving, poignant story about people who lived in Greece at one point.
I’m looking forward to reading that. Thank you very much.