I don’t know how she does it-  her timing, wit, knack for creating lovable, flawed characters and slowly building sexy romance is just perfect. This particular story centers around a somewhat unhinged Jane Jackson, who was a child TV star and now 20 years later or so, is still in Hollywood and trying to get a movie produced.

Jane is not having much luck and whenever Jane gets nervous, she hides in her closet or her under her desk at work and eats candy. Enter Dan Finnegan, an arrogant cinematographer who almost immediately becomes Jane’s nemesis when he trashes her latest film idea to her boss, Nathan. I should add that Dan is somewhat handsome, a cross between a fireman and a swimsuit model.

I first interviewed Annabel about Nora Goes Off Script a few years ago and have not stopped devouring her comedic love stories ever since. I feel about Annabel’s writing a bit the way I feel about my pug Josephine, who I remind daily that she’s not allowed to die ever, and Annabel is not allowed to stop writing ever.

Below are edited highlights from our Q&A. You can listen to the full episode here on Elena Meets the Author. Annabel, welcome to the show.

Annabel: Oh my goodness. That is honestly the best thing I’ve ever heard. I don’t think anyone’s ever likened me to their dog before and I have a dog. I know what a compliment that is.  Thank you for having me back.

Elena: My pleasure. Is there anything else you’d like to add about your book without giving the whole plot away?

Well, they’re going to do a little bit of traveling. The story itself is really about coming to terms with all the stories you’ve told yourself your entire life growing up, all the beliefs that we hold really tightly about ourselves and taking a second to let some of them go so that we can move on with our lives.

Elena: So your inspiration for this book, I saw in your acknowledgements that you mentioned a book called I’m Glad My Mom Died. Can you tell us about that?

 It is such a hard title to say, isn’t it? Every time I say it, I almost wish I never brought it up.  I picked that book up two years ago, and I read it straight through and when I finished, I turned back to the first page, and I read it again. I don’t think I’ve ever done that in my life.

It’s by Jennette McCurdy. She was a teen star. I was so taken by the writing. I don’t know that I’ve ever read writing quite that crisp and unusual. I also really got into the mind of teen stars and all of these teens like Jennette that I watched growing up.

So, while I was watching them, they were going through puberty on tv. And when I think about that time in my life, it was all about trying things on, maybe I’m going to dress like Madonna now, or maybe I’m going try to have this personality. What was it like to grow up on TV where you’re actually being dressed and given a script every day?

Is there part of your life where you missed your personal development as a person because you were always told where to stand. So that’s where Jane Jackson came from. She is the most unhinged character I’ve ever written. She is an adult. She’s trying to make it in the movie business. She is so unself-aware, has no clue really of who she is. So that was my starting point. I just wanted to see what she would be like all grown up.

Elena: Was it easy to write the whole unhinged part?

 Oddly, I’m embarrassed to say it was so much easier for me than trying to write somebody who has their act together. I mean, just the thrill of having her rip open candy bars on the floor of her closet and shove them in her mouth, the actual release that I felt. She’s a person who always knows what she’s going to say in advance, but then if she gets really mad, she just lets loose and says something totally different.

Elena: The film The Notebook comes up an awful lot. Jane professes to hate that film, but I don’t believe her. Does she really hate The Notebook?

 No, she does not. But as it’s revealed throughout the book, it’s a touch point for the moment in her life when she stopped believing in love. I happen to be a Notebook lover because I’m a normal human being. Everybody loves that movie. But there are a lot of holes that you can poke, and it was really fun to play the devil’s advocate and find those holes.

Elena: Each of your novels comes out just before the summer and they make me yearn for summer, like no other book. Where is this fictional seaside place based on, because it’s not quite the Hamptons.

 No, it is a made-up Long Island town called Oak Shore, same town as in my book Same Time Next Summer. It is so fictional that ordinary people have homes on the beach. I like a good fantasy.

Elena: You make it so people want to go there, like me, now.

 I don’t know how to get you to Oak Shore. Don’t bring your realtor to Oak Shore looking for waterfront property.

Elena: And so is it pretty much the deal with your publisher, where they say, every May, we’d like a book

 Yes. I’m in contract to write a book for summer 2026 and summer 2027. Don’t tell them, but I would do this for free and until I die. I honestly don’t know what else I’d be doing. It’s really what I love to do. And then the culmination of it, in a few weeks I’m going on book tour and that’s super fun. And then I’ll start another book.

Elena: Do you not panic a teeny bit with these deadlines? Or do you have enough ideas percolating that you’re okay?

 I don’t panic. When I was finishing this book,  I was having ideas about the book that I’m writing now, the next book. I’m not a good multitasker. Having children was really challenging for me. Like, why are we doing so many different things? So, I was terrified by how much I was thinking about that next book while I was finishing this book. So, I have to shut the door on any ideas. I don’t even write them down in a notebook. I’m like, it is not time. I’m not entertaining this idea yet. And then I start when I’m done.

Elena: I have to say I got uncomfortable because things were going quite smoothly and I was getting far along in the book and I knew there had to be a looming crisis. I just knew it. And then the crisis came, and I had to speed read past it. It was so uncomfortable. I wanted to get back to the love part.

 Oh, I love that it made you uncomfortable.

Elena: Very.. and Jack Quinlan is such a bad person. You need to do a sequel where something bad happens to him.

 Yes, he gets lice. Is there something worse than that? That was the first thing I could think of.

Elena: That’s really bad. Dan, the quiet, thoughtful cinematographer who is not exactly what Jane thought he was. Did he come to you quite naturally?

 I just started writing Dan.  I was probably two drafts in before I understood who he was. One thing I’ll tell you is that I am married to a quiet man. I really like a quiet man.  Leo Vance from Nora Goes Off Script may be the sexiest man alive. But he’s not my type. I adored him while I was writing him, but that’s not for me. I loved writing a man who just knows who he is and doesn’t have to justify it to everybody.  I find that very, very attractive. So, you know, maybe my own household sort of snuck in there on this one.

Elena: Nice,  I like a quiet man too. Your love scenes, do you read them aloud? What’s your secret to writing them so convincingly without being in any way pornographic or corny?

 It’s getting easier just because I’ve been doing it more. I draft those scenes over and over again, and then I put them away and then reread them. Sometimes somebody’s got three arms. I have to imagine them.

There are two approaches to writing a love scene. One has body parts in it, and one doesn’t have body parts in it, like we’re not naming body parts. So, my approach is we’re together and you can see how they are together and how it’s going, but you’re not saying all the things.

Elena: It’s very suggestive. You barely mentioned a breast. I think that was it.

 I’ve gone wild. I’ve gone totally off the rails. But you know, the truth about all that kind of stuff is the moments before the kiss are more exciting than the kiss. It’s the anticipation of the thing, the buildup that feels really great. So that’s fun to write.

Elena: What was the most difficult part to write?

The thing with her mother, it’s really complicated. Jane has a very close relationship with her mother. They do and say everything to make each other happy. But they don’t always say the honest thing. Towards the end of the book, there is more honesty and something kind of blows up. And it was important to me to get that right. And that was very difficult.  I wrote that a lot of times and in a lot of different ways. Opening up the hard conversation and how that would actually look.

Elena: Right. And it was very interesting too that the mother had such a different attitude towards love than her daughter, than Jane. She was willing to get hurt.

 Her mother would jump off any cliff, like, oh, this is going to be great. He’s the one, let’s go. But you know, as often happens, if you have a parent who maybe spends money to their own peril, you become very frugal. We are often a reaction to our parents and Jane saw her mother get her heart broken and put her back together enough times to know that love is not safe.

Elena: I thought this could make a great film. You’ve got that magical setting, those handsome Finnegans, the steamy scenes, Jane in her Eleanor Roosevelt bathing suit. Do you ever try to make your books into films?

I have book to film agents in Los Angeles, this very cool duo of young women, and they are sending this out.  Nora Goes Off Script has been optioned, and that’s something that’s going to happen in the next year if it happens. I’ll give you news as it comes.

Elena: Okay good because I can help with the casting. So, tell us about what you’re working on now.

 Okay, so I am on the second draft of this. I’m not going to write 13 drafts on this book. This one’s going to come together, in case my editor’s listening to this, I swear to God, this is not going to break your heart. So, this is about a woman. She’s a single mother, she’s 39, about to turn 40, and she is a part-time kindergarten teacher. She also works for her dad at this fish store that he owns, and she strikes up a fake dating relationship with a man, who is kind of like a Vanderbilt. The whole thing’s a little bit like Pretty Woman, but there are no hookers.

 Thank you!

May, 2025

Neroli’s book centres around a gutsy, young, Manhattan based documentary maker named Zandy, who turns her lens on a legendary perfume maker in the south of France that happens to be celebrating its 300th anniversary.

Zandy has been assigned this story by her boss. She’s not thrilled about what looks like a puff piece, only to discover there’s a lot more to this perfume house than pressed flowers, a dashing CEO to start, and a family history that doesn’t smell so fragrant. The story is not black and white. The truth doesn’t always tell the whole story, which is one reason why I loved this book. Below are the edited highlights of my lively chat with Neroli. You can listen to the full episode here on my podcast Elena Meets the Author or wherever you listen to podcasts. Even better, we are giving away the e-book on the show notes of the episode.

ELENA: Neroli, let’s start by discussing the themes of  The Perfumer’s Secret. How would you describe them?

NEROLI: Well, first of all, thank you for that amazing description. You really captured this particular corner of France and the tradition of craft here. So, thank you for that.

I think the central theme of the book is that there’s no such thing as a single truth, everybody has their own truth, and the truth is made up of a multifaceted version of everybody’s story.

ELENA: That makes sense to me. I was thinking that even at the very beginning of the book when Zandy is having her little fling with Luke, he says something like that… That there are so many different ways to see the world which echoes your theme.

That was quite intentional. As a novelist, you’re like a puppeteer, dropping a little bit of the theme in for the reader’s subconscious mind to start thinking about.

ELENA:  You wrote in your newsletter that some writers spend their life building up to the novel they were meant to write. Do you consider The Perfumer’s Secret the novel you were meant to write? And how did your life before this book prepare you to be a novelist?

 Well, I’ve done a lot of things on the way to writing this book. I was a journalist for many years. I wrote for all the great British newspapers, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Evening Standard. I’ve been an investment banker and a commodity futures trader. I’ve travelled all over the world.

 I’m the proud mother of two wildly spirited daughters and an adventurous stepson. I have been training my whole life to do this work and I’m now living the life of my dreams.

So, to answer the first part of your question, is this the ultimate book? I think it was the book I was meant to write then. It’s been two years in the publishing process. For me as a writer, I’m constantly raising the bar of where I want to be. So, I think it’s a balancing act between being content with the work that you put out in the world, slowing down a minute and being happy with the work that you’ve done and celebrating that. And at the same time, learning to write character. I’ll be doing that, please God, for the rest of my life. There is no way to master this. It’s a never-ending journey.

ELENA: Did you always know you’d love to be a novelist?

You know, I did, but I didn’t dare take the step. I think two things, you can’t pay the bills as a novelist unless you’re, I don’t know, Kristen Hanna or Emily Henry or Colleen Hoover and maybe back then in my twenties and thirties and forties, it wasn’t quite the right time for me.

I knew because reading books made me feel alive in a way that nothing else did. Perhaps only my beloved family. But then it’s a long journey to have the courage to pursue that there’s a lot of why me and can I do this and so on.

 I think what I’ve learned most from this experience not just of writing – I’ve written three novels and I’m just beginning my fourth now- this is the first one to be published – but what I have learned is certainly in terms of publishing the book and now engaging with the world with my work, I have really learned to follow your spark.

If you have a certain spark, listen to it. You don’t have to have the path to get there. You take one step and the path appears. And for me it was a very long journey.

ELENA: Love it. Great. Thank you. Why did your mother choose to call you Neroli? And how fitting that perfume began with a woman named Princess Nerola.

 My mother was a trailblazing, extraordinary woman who, in the 1940s, began trading essential oils. Those are the oils which come from pressing flowers. She wanted to be a journalist. So, she started off in journalism on Fleet Street, where the newspapers are in London.

And her father saw her coming out of a pub and said, ‘That’s it, no daughter of mine is ever going to be a journalist.’ He placed an advert in The Times for a secretary offering her services with fluent French and German. My mother was hired by a trading firm in in the city of London. That’s like Wall Street.

And she soon became their top trader. By 1949, the bank had come to her saying the business was in trouble and would she buy it, which she indeed did. She travelled all over the world trading commodities, all through my childhood, taking me hither and thither, including to Grasse.

She was a remarkable woman, sort of like Margaret Thatcher. In the trade she sold a lot of lemongrass. I’m a twin and the trade press said, Mrs Eileen Day Lawson has given birth to twins. Surely, they’re going to be called Citronella and Lemongrass, which luckily, we weren’t.

We were called Neroli and Virginia. And Neroli is named after Princess Nerola, from a province in the north of Italy. She used to perfume her gloves and her love letters to the princes of the courts around Europe with this incredible bitter orange blossom. So, she’s thought to be the founder of the use of perfume in the West. And that’s why my mother called me Neroli.

ELENA: This book was meant to be.

 I think it was.

ELENA: I wanted to say that not only was this book a joy to read, but I learned a lot. You have so many intriguing facts. I had no idea that one’s sense of smell is 10,000 times stronger than any of our other faculties.

And that there’s a museum dedicated solely to violets in Tourette sur Loup, a medieval village in the foothills of France, where your novel takes place.

 Which came first, the idea of the novel or, having a holiday home in Tourette sur Loup?

Very much the home. We were living, if you can believe it, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. My husband’s work took us there. I grew up in Kensington in London. Minneapolis was a very foreign place to me. And it was Arctic cold. We were raising two small daughters. So, it was absolute madness to buy a holiday home in the southeast corner of France near the border with Italy where the mountains come down to the sea.

It was bonkers, but it was love. We used to come basically just at Christmas when the girls were small and couldn’t leave the school year and so on. As they say in France, it was ‘un coup de foudre’, love at first sight.

The more time we spent here, we hiked in the mountains, and we got to know the ways of the old stone village and the crafts and the slower pace of life and the traditions. And I realized that I had to write a love letter. I’m in love with the mountains. I look out at the beautiful Alps. I had to write a love letter to this landscape and that’s how The Perfumer’s Secret came to being.

ELENA: Was the novel inspired by any particular story?

 No, it was inspired by this landscape and by wanting to write a love letter. Then I had to figure out what kind of a story I could tell. It wasn’t something that came fully formed.

I had put myself on a regime of two pages a day. I mean, you can’t call yourself a writer if you don’t write two pages a day, right? So, I put myself on this regime, two pages a day which sometimes is hard, because what are you going to write about?

So, on one particular day, we were on a train up the East Coast to Connecticut to see my daughter at school. And I hadn’t written my pages, and I was tearing my hair out saying to my husband on the train, I don’t know what I’m going to write about, and I can’t go to bed before I’ve written these two pages.

And he said, ‘you’ve got to put a secret in there.’ He’s read a thousand mystery novels. I grew up in England having read a lot of literary fiction, which haven’t got much of a story. And it was such fun to hear his ideas about the engine of story and turning pages.

So, he gave me a few hints. Writing is such a solitary process. It’s really fun to share it, especially if you have a husband who’s excited about it like mine is. And so, I can actually remember that moment when the secret came into the story.

ELENA: Last question, can you recommend any book for our listeners?

 Oh, I certainly can. Thank you for asking that question. If you’re only going to read one book this year, read Isola by Allegra Goodman. It’s got a gorgeous cover. It’s set in 16th century Périgord, France, I had zero interest in 16th century France.

But believe me, this character, you’re going to go crazy for this character. And it’s an amazing story. This is the novel that this writer has been working towards. I think for the whole of her life. It is fantastic book. I think it’s going to be my favourite book of 2025.

ELENA: Well, that is it for my questions, Neroli. Thank you so much for such great answers and stories.

 Thank you, Elena. It’s amazing to have somebody else read your work and appreciate the things that you were trying to communicate. And what’s more fun than talking about books?

ELENA: Nothing. It was all a pleasure.

March, 2025

For some reason, Oriana is not as well known in the States as she is in Europe, which hopefully will change with Stacy’s debut novel. Christiane Amanpour said Oriana’s penetrative, fearless interviews with world leaders, as well as celebrities of the day, should be required reading for all journalism students.

I’ll be honest, when I started the book, I worried that it would be too dry, too intellectual for me. But Oriana was anything but dry. She was fiery, feisty, quick witted, extremely intelligent, a romantic, passionate, not to mention attractive and glamorous. I was soon swept away by the humanity in Oriana’s take on the world.

Below are some edited highlights from my conversation with Stacy Rubis. You can listen to the entire episode here on Elena Meets the Author or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Oriana’s Fearless Interview Style

Elena:  Hello Stacy. I loved your book. I was just so impressed how fearless Oriana was when interviewing leaders of the day.

 Exactly. My favorite quote of hers is, ‘I’m not intimidated by anybody.’ She interviewed Colonel Qaddafi, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Yasser Arafat amongst others. These are people with guns and guards in the room. They’re dictators and she just goes for it.

She asks the most provocative, persistent, impolite questions and she’s not afraid to do that and I find that amazing.

Elena: I have a quote from you where you talk about your favorite Oriana lines:  ‘You must be joking’ to a dictator who lied in answer to her question. There were armed guards in the room. And she prodded Gaddafi, “You don’t remember? You should. And also to Gaddafi, “I want to understand why everyone dislikes you so much.” To Kissinger, “Unless I’m mistaken, you’re a very cold man, Dr. Kissinger.” Do you have a favorite interview?

 The Kissinger one, but also, I really love the  interview with the then prime minister of Israel, Golda Meir. Golda and Oriana really hit it off. Oriana really respected Golda. She met Golda in her home in Tel Aviv. It was a very simple home. The housekeeper had gone home. Golda served coffee and cookies and washed her own dishes. They had a serious conversation about peace in the Middle East, but then Golda opened up to Oriana as a woman about the heartbreak of her life. And it was basically that Golda was in love with the same man from the age of 15, and they married, and they had children, but Golda really wanted a bigger life on the world stage, and he wanted a quieter life.

And so that led to their separation. But Golda told Oriana that she loved him until the day he died. And I think that Oriana understood from Golda that sometimes love is not enough. That for a woman who has ambition, it’s really hard to make it work. And I think Oriana was already experiencing that in her own life, to meld the professional and the personal.

Elena: That was great aspect to your book, the conflict Oriana had forever, that she was this fantastic journalist, but she grew up knowing in Italy you had to be a wife and a mother, and take care of your husband, and have children, and no matter how successful she was, she didn’t have that.

 She called it a full life that she wanted, which is family and a profession. She was born in 1929. So, she would be almost a hundred today and there weren’t many role models for women who were doing both. Succeeding at home, succeeding in the world. And that’s what I find so poignant about Oriana’s story. As tough as she was- she basically elbowed her way to the top of a male dominated field, she never went to university. she was born poor, she barely spoke English when she came to the United States – she made it to the point where Newsweek called her the greatest interviewer of her time. Dick Cavett introduced her on his show as a legend. She made it to the top, and yet, there was a price to pay for a woman of her generation.

I find that incredibly poignant and that’s really what I wanted to be at the heart of my book. What I found surprising in doing events and talking about Oriana to people is that young women really relate to the novel. Which makes me happy in one way, but sad in another, because we are still dealing with the challenges that Oriana had, which are work life balance, reproductive rights, and sexism in the workplace. The fact that young women can still relate today really says something.

Elena: As successful as the chain-smoking Oriana was, she struggled at love. She seemed to fall for the wrong men, men who were jealous of her success, until she met Alexander Panagoulis, a Greek poet and resistance fighter, ten years her junior. So, I’m guessing, that a lot of the fabulous love scenes in your book are drawn from A Man, Oriana’s book about Alexander?

 The scenes are based on reality, but they’re fictionalized.  I’m a big romantic, and I think Oriana and Alexander is one of the greatest love stories that we don’t know.

It has passion and politics. She was 10 years older than him. They lived in different countries. She was the powerful one in the couple. She was at the peak of her journalism profession when she met him, and he was just out of prison. He didn’t have a job. He didn’t have money.

A couple of journalists have called the book sexy.

Elena: The story is definitely sexy.

 It was an electric love affair, very charged. They had real values and ideals and were willing to give up a lot for those ideals. So, it’s very dramatic. Alexander is a real figure. He resisted Greece’s dictatorship from 1967 to 1974. He almost sacrificed his life to get rid of the dictator. He was thrown into jail, was tortured for five years and when he got out, he still didn’t stop and he was eventually elected to Parliament He decided to try to affect change from the inside. But his enemies assassinated him and made it look like a car accident.

And so, again, a very dramatic, true story. Oriana loved him for those last three years that he was alive. They were together in Italy and in Greece. She calls him her great love. I think he reminded her a lot of her father who resisted Italy’s occupation and who fought for freedom and human rights and for the little people. And that was the same with Alexander.

Elena: Alexander wasn’t diminished by her success at all. He was so proud of her.

 In prison, he read her books. He said reading her books gave him the fire and the courage to stay alive in prison.

Elena: And this is all before he even met her?

Yes. So basically, he fell in love with her by reading her books, and then when he got out of prison, by some kismet, some universal coincidence, she decided to go interview him. So, she left Italy and went to Athens on his third day of freedom to interview him. She stole the assignment from somebody else at her newspaper.

Somebody else was supposed to go to interview the Greek freedom fighter. And she’s like, no, I will go, and she did. And it was love at first sight.