My next book
Plus: "The Rothschild and the Snowstorm" and the "Napalm Girl" photo saga
Toward the end of 2022, a few months after the release of my first book, I started researching a story that I hoped would evolve into my second book. My preliminary digging went well, and by summer 2023, I had enough material to start working on a proposal—and also to convince my editors at Vanity Fair to let me do something for the magazine in the meantime. The resulting feature was published nearly a year ago in VF’s annual Hollywood issue, and the response was more gratifying than I could have hoped for. Over the next few months I wrapped up the book proposal, which my brilliant literary agent went out with on submission toward the end of summer 2024. After some great conversations with editors, we landed at Union Square & Co., which was then part of Barnes & Noble and is now—as of Union Square’s sale to Hachette this past November—part of the revered Grand Central Publishing Group. Anyway I realize I’m a few months late in mentioning this, but I was waiting for the ink to dry on my contract, which it finally did last night. Hooray! (These things take time.) You’ll hear more about this in 2027 when it’s time to start shamelessly shilling pre-orders. Until then:
Meanwhile, I have a wild feature in the February issue of Town & Country, which went up online earlier this week:
If you’re interested in decades-old unsolved mysteries, 1970s-era rich people kidnappings, provincial Italian villages, Vatican intrigue, the Rothschilds, British tabloid crime, mountains, blizzards, or all of the above, you won’t wanna miss this one:
For more than four decades intrigue has shrouded the strange tale of Jeannette Bishop May and Gabriella Guerin, who disappeared in a snowstorm one night and were found dead more than a year later. Their story was a media sensation in Italy and England, with conspiratorial elements that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Dan Brown thriller: a Christie’s heist, a Sardinian kidnapping gang, the apparent mafia murder of a banker, and the disappearance of a teenage girl, each tied to the Vatican. Not to mention the fact that Jeannette had once been married to one of the world’s richest men, from one of the world’s most powerful families: Sir Evelyn de Rothschild.
“It’s like a novel,” says Alessandro Galassi, a Rome-based filmmaker who grew up in Macerata and made a documentary about the case. “People talk about Jeannette May like it’s a case that happened yesterday. It’s a legend.”
Pick up a copy on stands or read the rest over at townandcountrymag.com. (BONUS: scroll down for the aforementioned documentary.)
What else? Have you been following the saga over the famous “Napalm Girl” photo from the Vietnam War? If not, go read my pal David Friend’s fascinating story about the controversy. (TL;DR: “A new Sundance documentary, which questions the provenance of a Vietnam War icon, has set off a pitched battle between photojournalists and the filmmakers.”)
That’s all for now. More soon…