We chat with author Caitlin Alice Gilbert about La Dolce Veto, which is a bold and emotionally resonant romance that flips the script on scandal, and shows the power of self-discovery, redemption, and a summer of love in a small Italian town.
Hi, Caitlin! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
Hi! I’m Caitlin. I grew up in small towns in Michigan and Arizona but have been living in Los Angeles for over a decade now and I love my city. I’m a pop culture fiend. I consume a lot of television (current favorites: The Pitt; Shrinking; all of the Housewives) and also love theatre, tennis, and women’s soccer – specifically Angel City FC. I voraciously consume anything with a good love story hence how we got here.
When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
I genuinely cannot remember a time when I didn’t want to tell stories. I specifically remember being excited to learn to write in first grade so I could write all my ideas down. Is a need to tell stories cellular? Because I feel like I was born with it.
Quick lightning round! Tell us:
- The first book you ever remember reading: The Little House on the Prairie
- The one that made you want to become an author: The Proposal by Jasmine Guillory
- The one that you can’t stop thinking about: These Summer Storms by Sarah MacLean
Your debut novel, La Dolce Veto, is out April 7th! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Escape, Reclamation, Yearning, Restart, ITALY
What can readers expect?
To be wrapped up in swoony escape to the Italian countryside but to follow a real, human journey of starting over and finding your way back to who you are meant to be.
Where did the inspiration for La Dolce Veto come from?
My friends and I are forever sending Italian villas for sale back and forth asking “should we buy this?” or “should we just move to Italy?” A part of it is that I, like Izzy, studied abroad in Italy and dream of going back to a time when life felt much simpler, but there’s also this bigger idea in books and movies that Italy is this kind of mystical fairyland you can run away to when life gets too hard, and you’ll get swept up in the splendour of the countryside and all of your problems will be solved. And also, I think there’s a very millennial concept of reaching your 30s nowadays and being like, “wait, I was promised that if I work hard, I’d have all of the things I wanted and here I am, not fresh out of school anymore, and I still feel like it’s all so far away…so screw it!” I wanted to speak to both of those thoughts because it felt very relevant to me and what everyone around me was going through at the time. And then I just thought, and this is a very improv 101 training thing, where’s a really high stakes place I can put this? And that’s how I got to Congress. Because I can imagine that for someone as idealistic and hard-working like Izzy, she’d have an extra hard time meeting her expectations with reality in that setting.
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
I really enjoyed writing Sutton, Benito’s London girlfriend. I think it would be easy to make her plainly villainous and one-note, but I always saw her as so much more complex than that. I also love Marisol – she is unintentionally but absolutely a culmination of all my best friends.
Did you face any challenges whilst writing? How did you overcome them?
Yes, yes. Of course. I finished writing the first iteration of this novel in spring of 2023 but did a major revision with the help of my agent in the fall of 2024 which turned out to basically be a page one rewrite. It was incredibly daunting to try to reframe and reshape characters that I felt like I already knew so well, but I went through a lot both personally and professionally during the time between drafts and I think that really helped inform Izzy. Not to sound so trite, but I think I got to know myself a lot better through that time and it helped me understand Izzy in a different light. I think we both are people with giant dreams who would, in a weird way, love to not have giant dreams because we think it would be simpler. I think Izzy wants to be the person that can give up on her ambition and Eat, Pray, Love her way through life but deep down she knows that a part of her is always going to want what she’s always wanted. That was a lesson I had to learn for myself before I passed it on to her.
This is your debut novel! What was the road to becoming a published author like for you?
I was very lucky in that once I went on sub with my agent, the book sold very quickly. In a more existential sense, it’s been a long road. I was very hyper-fixated on TV and film writing for most of my 20s and had slowly narrowed in that I wanted to write romantic comedies. When the pandemic hit, like everyone else I was deeply contemplating my life and all my choices and happened to pick up my first contemporary romance novel. It was such a lightbulb moment for me. I was like, “wait you can do this???” The genre has everything I love about classic romcoms and I just very quickly devoured so many romance books and knew I wanted to try writing my own. My friend Michelle Wangsgard, who’s also a writer, sent me a copy of Save the Cat Writes a Novel and the rest is, as they say, history.
What’s next for you?
I am currently working on my next book which features a minor character from La Dolce Veto so…stay tuned!
Lastly, what books are you looking forward to picking up this year?
I’m counting down the days until Carley Fortune’s next, Our Perfect Storm. I’m also very excited for Joss Richard’s second book, Let’s Kiss and Tell and Annabel Monaghan’s Dolly All the Time – I binge-read all her books at the end of the last year and I am obsessed.
