Trigiani's 'Big Stone Gap'

A small mountain town with some big-time eccentrics is the setting of the new novel Big Stone Gap, about a woman who thinks life has passed her by. She learns the best is yet to come.

Author Adriana Trigiani, who has also been a filmmaker and a TV writer, at one time working for the Cosby Show, spoke with Early Show Anchor Bryant Gumbel.

"Women relate to this because she's such a busy, busy person with the outdoor drama and the rescue squad," she adds. "And the other characters all mirror her."

"She has a secret shame in the book," the writer says. "All the other characters somehow have to feed in to that secret shame and help her. So the community rises to the occasion and sort of saves her life."

All writing may be somewhat autobiographical but the author insists she is not Ave Maria Mulligan, her book's heroine. "Growing up in this small Virginia town,...in Big Stone Gap, I had these feelings of repression and longing," she says. "I'm from a big Italian family. And a lot of that's about, you know, keeping the kids in control. And those feelings of, 'I'm not meeting my potential.'"

"So when I went back to the place in my mind, I went back to the feelings. They just come back," she adds.

Writing a novel was a break from screenwriting. "It's just nice to be alone in your pajamas for a year working on a book. It fulfills you in a certain way," she says.

The world of a screenwriter is a different sort, she explains. "You're in a room with a bunch of people 'til all hours of the morning making jokes. And it's a lot of fun, but it's not just your work; it's collaborative, which is great. But this is very different. You own it and you know, no one tells you, 'You can't put that in,' or 'Change this' or 'I don't like the title.'"

Trigiani adopted a laissez-faire approach to coming up with her characters. "I let them go where they may, totally because I had nothing to lose," Trigiani says.

Trigiani got her weird characters from life, not just from Big Stone Gap, but from everywhere else she's been, she says. "But they fit in Big Stone Gap," she adds.

Perhaps because of the weird characters, this book has been compared favorably by some to humorist Dave Barry's books.

"I don't like to be compared," Trigiani says. "My book is...in the first person, which his are, too, many times. But it's about the life of a woman, so it's a little different in that way. But I hope it's funny, because I want it to be funny."

She does not take offense when people characterize her work as a wmen's novel. "Well, women are half the world, but we're finding big burly men are liking it," she adds. "I've been traveling, and they come up to me as much as the women."

The book has already exceeded her expectations. "It's insane what's happened," she says. "You write the book, and then it gets published, and they put this beautiful cover on it that looks like the place you grew up, that people are all sort of getting it. It's a miracle to me because...it's your secret self, and then it's out there."

She's also doing the screenplay and will direct it. And she's writing a sequel.

"I see three books, because by the end of the next book, I wanted to take you into her old age, because I think that that's fascinating," Trigiani says. "And I have a lot of stories from my grandmother that I wanted to play with."