The name Radziwill conjures up royalty, both American and foreign: the former husband of Lee Bouvier Radziwill, the younger sister of Jacqueline Kennedy, was Polish Prince Stanislaw Radziwill. But Carole Radziwill (nee Di Falco), who in 2005 chronicled her tragically short-lived marriage to Prince Anthony Radziwill (son of Lee and Stanislaw) in her memoir, What Remains, was never impressed by that sort of thing.
The journalist, from a working-class family in upstate New York, became an award-winning ABC news producer, then a columnist for Glamour magazine, and, not incidentally, will be starring in her second season of Bravo TV’s Real Housewives of New York. She has just written her first novel, The Widow’s Guide to Sex and Dating (Henry Holt, Brilliance Audiobook, both Sept.), a hilarious account of a young widow’s journey to find herself and re-establish her identity after living in the shadow of her husband, a world-famous writer and sexologist.
Radziwill tells Show Daily that several years after her husband died she was regaling friends at a dinner party in the Hamptons about some firsthand dating horrors: “Christiane Amanpour, an old friend, was laughing with everyone about the stories. She said, ‘You should write these down. Maybe one day this will be a book for you.’ I never wrote anything down, but she did plant a seed.”
Radziwill decided to write her memoir first, which ironically, she started as a novel because she wanted to be removed from the story. “But it occurred to me early on that the story was almost too unbelievable to be fiction: the girl from upstate New York moves to the big city, marries a prince, and then has this great life that’s cut short by his cancer, and the deaths three weeks before of her best friend [Carolyn Bessette Kennedy] and my husband’s cousin [John F. Kennedy Jr.]. Who’s going to believe that?”
So she wrote her memoir, which, with her background in telling nonfiction stories, was not as formidable to write as she thought it might be. But when she turned to fiction she was surprised. “Writing a novel, for me at least, was a thousand times harder than the memoir. The only barrier you have is your imagination, which is great on the one hand, but it’s really daunting on the other.”
No doubt, Radziwill is banking on her television career on Bravo to influence book sales. “I can’t deny the power of the show to move product. I mentioned What Remains twice on the show. It was in my introduction, where I said I wrote a New York Times bestseller about my family. And one of the other housewives had read it, so we talked about it a little and that was it.” During the course of the four months that the show was on the air, an additional 47,000 copies were sold and it went back on the Times bestseller list for e-books.
This is the author’s first BEA appearance, and she will be part of a panel discussion today, 2–4 p.m., in Room A101 on book narration with actor Andrew McCarthy and moderator Carmine Gallo (Radziwill is voicing the Brilliance Audiobook version of her novel). She will be signing galleys after the discussion.
