Cousins Use a Novel Way to Create a Family Tale

We’ve all heard of shuttle diplomacy, but how about shuttle collaboration?

That’s what June Triglia Casey calls her writing partnership with her cousin Joan Triglia. Casey lives in Santa Ana; Triglia lives in Pittsburgh, and in 1985 they teamed up to write a novel.

Thousands of miles of commuting back and forth and hundreds of hours on the telephone later, they’ve produced “Bound By Blood” (Onyx; $4.95), an Italian family saga spanning more than two decades and two continents.

The paperback novel, co-written under the name June Triglia, has been praised by Publishers Weekly as being “powerfully authentic . . . a moving saga of family love.”

Casey, 40, who has written 12 romance novels over the past 10 years, and Triglia, 39, a Pittsburgh social studies teacher, have signed a contract with New American Library to write two more novels.

The idea for writing an Italian family saga, fittingly, came to Casey and Triglia at a family reunion in Pittsburgh at Christmas in 1984.

The two cousins were sitting at the dining room table listening to their Uncle Joe talk about his sister, who had died under tragic circumstances in the ‘30s.

Casey said their uncle, a 68-year-old architect, was not normally an emotional man.

“We were so moved by that experience,” she recalled. “It struck us that we had stories in our families that were powerful.”

That summer, Casey returned to Pittsburgh to see her uncle, who by then was dying.

“I stayed with my cousin,” she said. “That’s when we got close and the ideas started to jell.”

Over the next few months, Casey made two return trips to see her uncle and to begin tape-recording interviews with older family members as research for their book.

Casey said she and her cousin originally intended to write a biographical novel about their family, “but the deeper we got into it we realized that was much too limiting. We had to fictionalize it.”

Still, she said, in writing “Bound By Blood”: “We wanted to capture the emotional reality of what it was like to grow up in an Italian family during the Depression, our parents’ generation.”

In interviewing their older relatives, Casey and Triglia asked them about day-to-day life in Pittsburgh in the ‘30s--what it was like being part of a family of 12 living in a tiny house in the Italian ghetto overlooking the steel mills.

Casey said the interviews allowed them to catch “the flavor of the times such as what the streets smelled like when they (were) making wine that time of year”--and the fact that meat was so scarce that, as a boy, their Uncle Joe would wait until the end of the meal in order to savor his only sliver of meat.

On the basis of an outline and 200 sample pages, Casey and Triglia were signed by New American Library (Onyx is one of its imprints) in 1988 to write the novel.

At an editor’s suggestion, they tightened their story and instead of killing off a minor character named Angie, they made her the main character, a naive young woman who becomes an internationally renowned opera star.

They also created Angie’s sister, Nickie, someone, Casey said, “that Angie could play off of. Angie is the sweet, good girl and Nickie is kind of the manipulative younger sister.”

When they started the novel, Triglia had never written a book before and Casey was “burned out” writing romance novels. “I wanted to attempt something more complex.”

“It took us 2 1/2 years to do a book on this scale,” she said, noting that the typical romance novel has two main characters and spans a compressed time frame. By comparison, “Bound By Blood” has four major characters, a host of minor characters and spans the ‘30s to the ‘50s.

Over a period of four years, Casey made more than a dozen trips to Pittsburgh and Triglia would come out to Santa Ana during Easter break.

And then there were the long-distance phone calls.

“On Saturday when the rates are low we’d go three or four or five hours,” she said.

In fact, when they were getting “Bound By Blood” ready for final submission, they did a page-by-page reading over the phone, using a timer so they could even out the phone bill.

“Bound By Blood” was Casey’s first collaboration and, she said, she enjoyed it tremendously.

“It was almost like leading a dual life,” Casey said. “I never got tired of it. The thing that carried us through the writing process is the pleasure of working together and laughing about it.

“It’s sort of synergetic energy coming out of two minds working together. We have periods where we’re lost in what we call the abyss. But when you have two people bouncing ideas back and forth eventually you find a way out. You spend a lot less time going around in circles.”

The two cousins have nearly completed writing their second book, a contemporary woman’s novel which also deals with a family theme and is set in Italy, Sicily and New York.

The new novel is based on a “kernel of an an idea” gleaned during their interviews with family members.

An elderly female cousin, who has since died, was born 85 years ago in an Italian prison where her mother had been sent for murdering a man. “We don’t know the circumstances,” Casey said. “We can only hope it was self-defense.”