After writing what would become the wildly successful Honeymoon with my Brother, which has since been optioned by Sony Pictures, author Franz Wisner was offered a writing assignment by a travel magazine. As he says, "The book was done. I was still single. I had to post an ad in craigslist to get a date to go to "Sandals" (the couples only resort) to do a writing assignment for the magazine."
For any of you unfamiliar with Franz's first book, it's the true story of Franz getting dumped by his fiancee just days before his wedding. With everything already paid for, friends and family convince Franz to have the wedding anyway. His estranged younger brother, Kurt, is the "stand-in" for the bride at the Costa Rican honeymoon. During that honeymoon, the brothers decide to quit their jobs, embark on a two-year journey to travel the world (eventually visiting an astounding fifty-three countries), and in the process forge a close brotherly bond, yet still manage to maintain close connections to family back home, particularly with LaRue, their step-grandmother. Franz pens letters to LaRue throughout their trip. She maps their destinations in red pins on the world map in her nursing home, and the brothers are cheered on from afar by those in the nursing home. Without sacrificing the plot of this memoir, the last chapter is simultaneously heart wrenching and uplifting.
I interviewed Franz Wisner as he was driving to a radio interview in Sacramento. Franz and I had exchanged a playful volley of emails leading up to the interview (one in which he said he felt like a "bat-boy at Yankee Stadium based on the Literary Itinerary author line-up"). I knew it would be a fun interview.
After returning to American from his honeymoon, he says "I was single, and moved to LA: the worse place to be single. I found the LA dating scene to be completely bizarre. America's singles bars are dark rooms where you can't see, people are dressed up in borrowed clothes, women have tons of eyeliner on, TVs are blaring in the background, there's the constant interruption of blackberries and cell phones. The solution: massive quantities of alcohol."
"After going through that horrific dating process," Franz says, "I thought there's got to be more to love than this, so I sold the proposal for my current book, How the World Makes Love."
Something happened that changed Franz's life and changed the focus of the book. He met a woman he started to fall in love with. He ditched the original proposal, which he had planned to write in the third person, and wrote a different book about love in the first person.
Franz says, "The questions I had went from those of someone on a reconnaissance mission to those of someone on a much more personal rehab mission. It became imperative to write it that way."
(Stay tuned for more excerpts from our interview.)
Carole Flynn is the author of Literary Itinerary and Literary Unleashed.
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