In a New Memoir, the Travels of Frances Mayes Reach from the Triangle to Tuscany, and Back Again
originally Published: sep 22, 2022Frances Mayes’ romantic 1996 memoir, “Under the Tuscan Sun,” about buying and renovating a rickety but venerable Italian villa, kicked off a writing career that has continued with gusto into her eighties.
Frances Mayes has nearly equal affection for leaving for a trip and returning home.
“Houses have always been just about as much of an obsession for me [as travel],” says Mayes, 82. “It’s just the obsession slightly tips in the direction of the airport. My mother was obsessed with houses. I think it just rubbed off on me, particularly because she never got the house she would dream of living in.”
Mayes has made a life of writing about both concepts. Her romantic 1996 memoir Under the Tuscan Sun, about buying and renovating a rickety but venerable Italian villa called Bramasole, kicked off a writing career that has continued with gusto into Mayes’s eighties. She’s written six books of poetry and three novels (“few,” she jokes; “some writers’ entire lives,” I say back). She has her byline on a cookbook and a “field guide to poetry.” Then there are the memoirs, about home, travel, and making a home in an unfamiliar place, which made her famous.
“I always think of myself as an undisciplined writer, but I look at all the books I’ve written and I realized that I do really get a lot done somehow,” she says one September morning when I call her on WhatsApp. At the time, she is in Cortona, Italy—her other home base besides Durham.
Her latest book, A Place in the World: Finding the Meaning of Home, released on August 23, is a set of essays and meditations on the concept of home, rife with literary allusions and lush sensory details, that reach from the Triangle to Tuscany and back again. The collection cuts between Mayes’s childhood in Fitzgerald, Georgia, and her homes in North Carolina and Italy, but it isn’t limited to homes she’s actually inhabited. She writes about the homes of her remarkable friends, describes new-to-her cities that feel like home, and finishes with loose associations and literary musings about the word and concept itself…
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