I didn’t feel a responsibility to continue on with my grandfather’s works. I mean I definitely consider it a privilege to be able to. I feel the responsibility is in doing it right and doing it well and one of the reasons that I decided to set this book in Rome was that my grandfather loved Paris and it was a second home to him.
He really knew the city so well and if you look at those books and you go to Paris even today, you see the same faces and the same places and even the same situations happening. And I felt that not knowing Paris, I really couldn’t do anything but a very touristic take on the city.
And I lived in Rome and I was able to, I knew the colors of the city. I knew what the city was like. I knew what the people were like. There’s a scene where Madeline’s running through the market and it was my local market and there’s a guy that I used to buy tomatoes from there, there’s the women I used to buy eggs from there.
So it was really, it was a way for me to put something of myself into the book while still doing it very much in my grandfather’s style and staying true to his artwork.
