The Wedding Officer

A Q&A with author Anthony Capella on his novel, The Wedding Officer


Can you name the first book you read that inspired you in some special way? Why?

Marcella Hazan’s vast cookbook The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. It looks like a cookbook—and it is, a brilliant one—but really it’s a guide to the recipes for life. ‘The taste [these dishes] have been devised to achieve wants not to astonish but to reassure. It issues from the cultural memory, the enduring world of Italian cooks, each generation setting a place at table where the next one will feel at ease and at home.’ ‘…It is a pattern of cooking that can accommodate improvisation and fresh intuitions each time it is taken in hand, as long as it continues to be a pattern we can recognise; as long as its evolving forms comfort us with that essential attribute of the civilised life, familiarity.’ Wow. Who writes recipes like that any more?

Many writing experts advise “write about what you know.” Do you agree with this? And what practical advice would you give an aspiring author?

No, I think this is outdated. These days, with the internet and online bookstores, we can all of us access knowledge very quickly—certainly fast enough that you can easily become expert about the period or milieu in which your book is set. The point is that you have to really want to acquire that knowledge. So I would say, write about what you love. And if you know so little about it that the process of learning what you need to know will excite and inspire you, then so much the better—you’ll excite and inspire your readers.

Which came first: the characters, or the storyline?

In my case, I was visiting Naples with a bunch of food-loving friends. I happened to take along Norman Lewis’s wartime memoir, Naples ’44. He was there during the Allied invasion of Italy in 1944 as an intelligence officer —and one of his tasks was to prevent Allied soldiers from marrying their beautiful Italian girlfriends: the high command had decided there were so many of these relationships it was getting out of hand. I immediately thought it was a delicious idea for a novel. I then started to think about a man doing that job who fell in love with an Italian woman himself…. The character of Livia, who is the intelligence officer’s cook, followed on from that. Like so many ideas, it was a case of two thoughts colliding: the idea of the wedding officer, and then the way that Italian food might change his attitudes to his job.

Can you tell us about the book you are working on now?

I’ve just finished The Various Flavors of Coffee, which comes out at the end of August. It’s the story of a young would-be poet and bohemian in 1890’s London who gets involved in the coffee trade. It’s an even more sensual story than The Wedding Officer—and although it’s comic in parts, it’s also sometimes darker, too. I think of it as being like dark chocolate or black Italian coffee: that hint of bitterness makes it all the more enticing.

When you finish writing your answers to this Q&A, what will you do next?

Cook!