We chat with author Sheila Yasmin Marikar about her latest release Friends In Napa, which follows six old friends who descend on Napa Valley for a luxurious weekend of fine wine and good times…until old tensions simmer to the surface.
Hi Sheila! To get started, can you tell your readers a little bit about you?
I was born in New Jersey but a year-long stint in Germany when I was 10 years old gave me a thirst for travel that remains unslaked. I spent the first years of my career in New York and moved to the west coast in 2013. These days, Los Angeles is home.
What was the first book you read that made you realize you wanted to be an author?
I don’t know if it made me realize I wanted to become an author—that didn’t happen until much later—but The Catcher in the Rye was the first book that got me excited about writing. My 7th grade book report about it was littered with curse words. I thought I was so clever…my teacher thought otherwise.
Do you have any writing rituals?
In the past, early mornings have been my golden hours but that’s changed. I’m trying to be less precious about writing. If an urge to write strikes at midnight and it’s easiest to do it on the Notes app of my phone, cool.
Your upcoming novel Friends in Napa is set in Napa wine country. Are you a wine fan and did you do some wine “research” while writing?
Every glass of wine I’ve had has led up to this moment. I’m kidding, sort of. Both Friends in Napa and my first novel, The Goddess Effect, were inspired by my own experiences. In the case of FIN, I’ve been to Northern California’s wine country more times than I can count, and because of my journalistic and personal proclivities, I’ve explored several other wine regions around the world. Something happens on a wine trip. It’s charged with a specific kind of energy. Maybe it’s the fact that you go in—well, at least if you’re me—knowing that you’ll be teetering on the edge of One Too Many for as long as you’re there, and as anyone who has ever had one too many knows, an excess of alcohol is a recipe for disaster, IRL and in fiction.
I did take a trip to Napa with five members of my family in March 2022, and several wineries and restaurants we visited during that jaunt spurred on the venues I imagined for Friends in Napa.
If you only had five words to describe Friends in Napa, what words would you choose?
Wild, fraught, nostalgic, telling, opulent.
Where did inspiration for Friends in Napa come from?
Beyond my own wine country related adventures, The White Lotus and the Netflix series Friends from College influenced the tensions that play out and the way the book is structured.
What are you most excited for for your readers when they dive into the story?
For their opinions of who’s “bad” and “good” to be subverted and/or tossed out entirely.
What’s next for you?
At the moment, I can’t say too much about my next fictional project, but it will occupy the same sandbox as Friends in Napa, one that I like to call Privileged People Behaving Badly.
