Francesco Paola was born in Turin, Italy, and was raised in Italy, Thailand, and Australia before moving to the US, where he earned an engineering degree from MIT and an MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. He is an accomplished technology entrepreneur, and from 2019 to 2021 worked at a legal cannabis startup in California while on a sabbatical from tech. He has written technical blogs, white papers, and articles for over twenty-five years as an executive in the tech-startup ecosystem. He and his wife, the novelist Jackie Townsend, have called New York City home since 1999.
Instagram: @fpaola01
Facebook: @francesco.paola.52
Are there particular films that have influenced your writing?
The Third Man (1949): Directed by Carol Reed, written by Graham Greene, the film stars Orson Welles as Harry Lime, Joseph Cotten as his best friend Holly Martins, and Alida Valli as Anna Schmidt, Lime’s girlfriend and soon to be Holly’s love interest. Holly Martins, a down and out writer of pulp novels, is invited by his friend Harry, whom he’s idolized since childhood, to come to post-World War Two Vienna and help him run his business, a business Holly knows nothing about but who soon finds out is the contraband of precious and scarce penicillin. The pace of the story; the arc of the relationship between the friends, especially Holly’s final disillusionment in Harry; the nefarious characters that Holly encounters along his journey; and the fateful end, all influenced the story, characters, narrative arc, and resolution of Left on Rancho.
High Plains Drifter (1973): Directed by and starring Clint Eastwood, a man with no name rides into the isolated town of Lago and is hired by its citizens to protect them from the imminent arrival of three gunslingers, outlaws who years before had been turned in by the town citizens for whipping the town marshal to death. Like a parasite feeding on its host, the man appropriates everything he can from Lago and simultaneously incites the citizens to turn on one another, seeding doubt and fostering dread, even forcing the citizens to literally paint the town red . . . The themes of the outsider riding into town and wreaking havoc on the status quo were an important thread throughout Left on Rancho. It’s only when Andrew, the outsider, starts to ask the hard questions and investigates the goings on that the status quo of Charlie, Adelanto, Kannawerks, and everyone involved gets turned on its head. The western theme is also an important aspect of the story, especially Adelanto: “[located] in the Inland Empire, was an isolated California backwater, an afterthought built by a desperate populace trying to sustain itself on the edges of an infertile desert.”
Seconds (1966): Directed by John Frankenheimer, is a psychological thriller where an unhappy Arthur Hamilton, played by John Randolph, agrees to fake his own death, have plastic surgery performed on him, and be relocated to California (from New York) to start a new life as Antioch Wilson, played by Rock Hudson. The theme of starting over, albeit in this case a drastic manner, is another important theme in Left on Rancho, where the protagonist, Andrew Eastman, leaves his life of twenty years behind to start anew in an industry and environment that is foreign to him. But at what price?
Favorite non-reading activity?
I was born in Italy and grew up in Thailand and Australia, where I was exposed to a multitude of cuisines at a young age. Add a grandmother willing to teach me how to cook during the summers I spent in Italy, and voila’, I have a set of tried-and-true recipes that I go to often.
Some of my staples include risotti: saffron, champagne, mushroom; pasta: ragu’ alla bolognese, carbonara, amatriciana, vongole; braised meat: short ribs, lamb shanks, duck; fish: poached, fried, baked; other assorted meat dishes like roast chicken; and lots and lots of legumes, vegetables, and fruit.
With in-season fruit and vegetables purchased at the Union Square Green Market in New York City I pickle vegetables: red onion, daikon radish, sauerkraut, Thai chilis; I preserve tomatoes, making enough to last all year; I make jam: apricot, blueberry, raspberry, cherry. Apple sauce too.
And every year I make fresh pasta dough for ravioli: pumpkin, meat, ricotta, lemon, or simply make tagliatelle and cook them with ragu’. The dough, however, does not always turn out perfect. It has to do with the eggs, and it’s a challenge to find eggs with bright red and orange yolks in the US, that taste like. . . well, eggs. Like those I ate growing up in Italy and Thailand. But we adapt.
Not all books are for all readers… when you start a book and you just don’t like it, how long do you read until you bail?
I’ll know whether I will finish a book after the first chapter, and I won’t waste my time after that. There are too many wonderful unread books on my shelves. Do the story and setting pull me in? Are the relationships real? Do I care about the characters (this does not mean one has to like the characters, despicable characters are fine as long as they propel the story forward)? And is it void of clichés, which is an important lesson that my editor taught me when I was writing Left on Rancho. I don’t think there are any left, but if you find one, let me know.
What’s the difference (at least for you!) between being a writer and an author? How do you shift gears between the two?
I write five days a week, every morning, for about two hours, and try to get approximately 800 words on a page—those words may all disappear the next day, but those 800 words must be written. Without this discipline, I would not get very far.
Then I move on to my full-time job. I’ve worked in tech for the last twenty-five years (with two spent working in cannabis), and a small part of my current job is to blog about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is impacting the Financial Services industry, like mortgage, retail, and investment banking.
To transition from ideating a scene, fleshing out a character, and developing a fictional plot to writing about technology that is, in real-time, changing the world requires some juggling, a lot of context switching, and an infinite amount of patience.
And playing guitar.
When covid hit and we were sequestered, habits changed. One of the things I did to maintain my sanity, other than making my bed every morning, was to pick up a guitar that had been in the back of my closet for over twenty years and re-learn. And in the process I found that focusing on a completely different activity not only helps me to separate routine tasks from one another, but it somehow seems to rewire my brain, cleanses the clutter, and allows me to more easily apply new-found energy and focus on the next task, work.
Do you speak a second language? Do you think differently in that language? Does it influence your writing?
I was born in Italy, and at the age of four I moved to Bangkok, Thailand, where I was surrounded by Americans (the year was 1971), and attended the International School of Bangkok (ISB), for all intents and purposes, an American school. Speaking Italian at home and learning English at an early age allowed me to become (and remain) bilingual in Italian and English.
The Italian language, together with the three years I studied Latin in high school, are fundamental for my writing. It’s not so much that Italian helps me to think differently—it does, depending on the context—it’s that it has a multiplier effect on my vocabulary. Sure, I can search online and find the perfect word to avoid repetition, to succinctly describe a scene, to evoke an emotion. Or I can scour my internal vocabulary, finesse some Italian equivalents, and hone in on the precise, exact, millimetric word.
Speaking of words.
I recently finished reading Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, in English, and while on a trip to Italy, I purchased a copy in Italian. I was curious; would my Italian cognitive abilities be up to the task? I don’t read many books in Italian, I stay updated on the language by reading the online papers, daily.
I was surprised at how different the original read, flowed, sounded. It was more alive, more intense, more passionate, the characters more real. Now, I am not saying that the translation is poor, after all, if it were, the novel would not have been named the best book of the twenty-first century by the New York Times.
I believe there are a few things at play here. First, let me say that I am no expert. I just happen to be an Italian who grew up in Italy with a Neapolitan grandfather who regaled me with stories of his childhood, stories in settings similar to those of Lila and Lenù; an Italian who grew up in an apartment complex in Italy (before I moved to Bangkok) that had a shared courtyard, a dank, dark, and scary cellar, and Maurizio and Andrea, two brothers slightly older than me who I hung out with, played games with, and who would occasionally pick on me.
Second, the Italian language has words that are not directly translatable into English. Take the title: L’Amica Geniale—My Brilliant Friend. Geniale has a much deeper, broader, complex meaning than Brilliant. Brilliant is one-dimensional. A brilliant light; a brilliant mind; a brilliant pupil. We know it can only mean one thing. But Geniale? It is multi-dimensional. Street-smart. Intelligent. Prescient. Deductive. Innovative. Able to think laterally—solving problems by going the indirect route. A prime example is how Lina went about refusing the hand of Marcello. She bided her time, absorbing the punishment of his presence, daily, at the dinner table, until she co-opted Lenù and together they pursued Stefano, or rather, Lila pursued Stefano through Lenù. Only after Lila had agreed to marry Stefano, did she refuse the hand of Marcello. Directly. Bravely. Threateningly. I wouldn’t call that just brilliant. Anyway, the reader will determine that the Brilliant in the title is much more. Or they should.
Regardless, it’s still a wonderful story, no matter what language it’s written in.