A dark literary fantasy set in 18th-century Venice, Maddalena and the Dark is the story of two 15-year-old girls—the wealthy Maddalena and the lonely Luisa—who get tangled in a complicated web of friendship and desire. | ✍️ adamm0rgan
As far as I can tell, no Chicagoan has written a novel about Italy since 1890, when Henry Blake Fuller’s queer-coded satire,was misinterpreted by critics to be an earnest heterosexual romance. More than 130 years later, I doubt readers will make a similar mistake with Julia Fine’s new novel.is the story of two 15-year-old girls—the wealthy Maddalena and the lonely Luisa—who get tangled in a complicated web of friendship and desire.
“I was a weird kid,” Fine says. “I started writing at an early age and acted out stories with Playmobil toys and Barbies.” A descendant of displaced European Jews who immigrated to Brooklyn and Detroit, Fine grew up in Chevy Chase, Maryland, the leafy suburb of Washington, D.C., “where all the worst Supreme Court justices are from.” Her parents were lawyers, but Fine grew up around books, including a series of children’s audiobooks on cassette tapes about classical music.
“You would hear little snippets of the music and learn about the composers,” Fine remembers. “The Vivaldi one was my favorite. It was about this orphaned girl he taught at the Ospedale, so I just filed that away for 30 years until I saw a PBS documentary on Vivaldi and realized, ‘Oh my god, this is a perfect setting for a gothic novel.’”
As a teenager, Fine fell in love with the speculative fiction of Diana Wynne Jones and Philip Pullman, which inspired her to major in English and psychology at Grinnell College in Iowa, where she met her husband, Rick. They moved to Chicago in 2010, where Fine worked selling ads in the Yellow Pages, followed by a role in a small PR firm. “It was really stressful, so one day I just walked in and quit,” Fine says.
She thought about going to law school like her parents but wanted to do something more creative and took inspiration from David Benioff, one of the showrunners of. “I looked him up and discovered he was a novelist first and he got an MFA.” So she applied for the creative writing MFA program at Columbia College Chicago, where she found a mentor in
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