About Novelist Carole Giangrande

I often write from two opposite sides of a border. It's a sense of life which began in early childhood when I lived in the northern end of New York City's Bronx. In those days, the borough looked and felt like a rural town at the edge of a huge metropolis. We were city people with one foot downtown and the other in the sticks.

My parents were second-generation Italian-Americans and lifelong New Yorkers, and when we moved north to Westchester County, it was not, at first, an easy fit. To this day, I'm more at home in cities, yet in the suburbs, I discovered my love of the natural world. We still lived close to New York, and as I grew up, it became a source of both solace and inspiration.

When I came to Canada in the Sixties to attend the University of Toronto, it took me a while to realize that I had become a foreigner - this time, by choice. Only I was, in fact, a hybrid: Canadian and American and not quite either. And having grown up surrounded by bilingual parents, aunts and uncles, I've ended up as a dual citizen in a bilingual country where I enjoy studying both French and Italian. These languages figure in much of my writing as a way of talking about the split worlds that many of my characters inhabit.

In thinking about my experiences, I like to use a writer's metaphor of a compost bin filled with kitchen scraps that over time break down into a rich and fertile loam. I don't put "real people" in my novels. What emerges on the page has been "composted" by time and reflection. The results, I hope, will be well-formed characters, boundaries to challenge and stories that you'll find provocative and intriguing.