The Reluctant Tuscan by Phil Doran

It's a story that's been told before: make a move to a foreign county, buy a house, wrangle with government red tape and workmen to make the house livable, meet quirky characters, write a book about the experience.

Under the Tuscan Sun...A Year in Provence...French Dirt...Castles in the Air...and now The Reluctant Tuscan (2005) by Phil Doran.

I will tell you up front that I love this sort of tale and Mr. Doran does a splendid job of telling his.  

A burnt-out, unemployed, fifty-something television sitcom writer finds himself in Cambione, Tuscany as the owner of a 300-year-old stone house that his wife bought on a whim on one of her long stays in Italy studying sculpting. 

He's not too happy. She is ecstatic that they have a common goal of working together on the house and making a new, more relaxed, life  for themselves. His heart(burn) is still in Hollywood even though his life there was stressed to the max.

But, reluctantly, he falls in love with the Italian countryside, the food, the people, the culture, and his wife...again. 

Mr. Doran has such an easygoing style and his stories are laugh-out-loud hilarious. In addition to resisting everything Italian - except the food and the espresso - Mr. Doran is having a life-crisis: without his work, who is he?

The story ends happily and the reader is treated along the way to many celebratory meals; an olive harvest; grey spiders; a baby goat; Italian drivers; molto vino; the aunts Nina, Nona, and Nana; and, festivals as only the Italians can put on. 

One such festival was the celebration of Festa della Liberazione honoring the liberation of the town by the Americans in World War II. The guest of honor was one Robert Hilliard who was one of the first soldiers to enter Cambione. He was from my home town.

Another bit of synchronicity was reading about the Dorans hanging a black-and-white family portrait of the cast of The Sopranos, the television show about American gangsters, on the living room wall. He told the contractor that those rough looking fellows were some of his wife's family in America. The purpose of this white lie was to intimidate the contractor, who had sent a bill for way more than the agreed upon charges, to lower his fees. I was reading these pages the day after it was reported that James Gandolfini, who played Tony Soprano, had died of a heart attack.

If you have an affinity for Italy and real-life stories such as this, I recommend The Reluctant Tuscan.  Molto buono.

A Trip to Tuscany

Phil Doran
Author of
The Reluctant Tuscan

I haven't had much luck with two of the fiction books I bought on my recent meanderings in Missouri. Apparently I didn't choose the most most popular books of authors Maeve Binchy (Nights of Rain and Stars) or Margaret Drabble (The Witch of Exmoor). Perhaps that is why I found them languishing in a used book store. 

Anyway, I am moving on to another find - the real life tale of American television writer and producer Phil Doran and his move from Hollywood to Tuscany. From the title of his book, The Reluctant Tuscan (2005), I take it he was not all that keen on the adventure.

The dust jacket tells me that actually it was Mr. Doran's wife, Nancy, who decided it was time for a change from their Life of Hell in Hollywood and surprised her husband by purchasing a 300-year-old Tuscan farmhouse for them to restore.

Some surprise, eh?

As Mr. Doran wrote comedies for television - Sanford and Son, The Bob Newhart Show, the Smothers Brothers - I feel as if I will be in good hands with the telling of this adventure. And I do love reading this sort of book in the same vein as Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence and Frances Mayes's Under the Tuscan Sun.

Here is how Mr. Doran begins:

I had a machete in my hand and I was thinking about using it on Henry David Thoreau. You know, that guy they made you read in school who popularized the notion that we should find solace in nature. Maybe I was doing this all wrong, but I had been hacking my way through nature all morning and all I had to show for it were blisters, sweat, and a shooting pain up my arm. I didn't think I was having a heart attack, but if I were, it would have been more amusing than dealing with a hill covered in underbrush so thick it made this little corner of Tuscany look like a Brazilian rain forest.