A book launch at Mission Point House earlier this year opened a new chapter for one of the Sunshine Coast’s most wide-ranging literary forces. Author M. J. Milne, who has been a member of the Sunshine Coast Writers and Editors Society for the past two years, officially debuted Secrets of the Italian Villa at a meeting of the association where haiku artist Sheila Weaver also premiered her newly published poetry collection.
For Milne, the journey leading to her book began 14 years ago, when a longtime relationship came to an end. What came next foreshadowed elements of her eventual storyline. “We were supposed to go away to Italy to a villa,” she recalled, “and my partner decided not to go. Instead, I met up with friends in a villa in Lucca, Italy, for a birthday party, where I was the 13th guest.”
En route, she visited Rome and paused on the Ponte Sisto over the Tiber river. A lone accordionist played at the apex of the bridge. “The sound of an accordion just opens the heart,” Milne said, “and that’s when I chose to break down, standing in the middle of the middle of the bridge, with people passing by.” After her emotional catharsis, she carried on to the villa reunion.
Three years later in Florence, after she lamented the lethargy of her creative drive, Milne’s sister urged her to write an Italian story. “And I thought to myself, first of all I don’t know Italian,” she said, “so how can I write an Italian story? But I looked at her and said: ‘I get it.’ And I did; I wrote about the villa.”
Secrets of the Italian Villa — set on the shores of Italy’s Lake Como — is itself a tale of healing and personal transformation. It begins with a posthumous jolt: the heroine, Geraldine, discovers that her recently deceased husband had been carrying on an illicit affair for months. Her best friend invites her to escape her trauma by accepting a housesitting engagement.
Geraldine accepts the call to adventure, and ends up at the titular villa in the company of a dozen female guests. She responds positively to amorous advances from another woman. The newly minted couple set about deciphering their domicile’s enigmatic history.
Milne’s prose is vivid and visceral; Geraldine speaks hard truths in vernacular that never minces her trauma and eventual emotional rebirth. “It’s a risk to get on with your life,” Milne explained, “to step up to the plate and fall in love with life.”
While Secrets is unapologetically a slow-burn romance (and “spicy,” admitted Milne), it’s also a roadmap to self-realization — a subject that Milne explored in her earlier (non-fiction) work 12 Golden Keys for a New World. Those twelve New Age strategies emanated from her debut novel, a science-fiction work whose plot came to her in a dream and which she channelled through the keys of a 1958 Smith-Corona typewriter. The manuscript’s 500 yellowed pages languished in a basement for a quarter-century before she finally published Universal Tides: Barbed Wire Blues in 2005 (it was re-released in 2023). Her readers clamoured for philosophical exposition of its lessons; in answer, she spent two years drafting 12 Golden Keys.
“The twelve keys are in [Secrets of the Italian Villa],” Milne said, “and if their message helps one person open their heart to love again, then I’m happy.”
Milne draws on fantastically eclectic life experiences: she mined for gold in Hyder, Alaska; cultivated an extensive art practice through oil painting (she studied at Emily Carr University); penned a half-dozen screenplays; and worked as a publicist for a music group.
“The number one key,” opined Milne, “is that you are the key. You can take charge of your life. And this is what Gerri McKenna, the main character [of Secrets of the Italian Villa] does.”
Milne’s books are available for order from local booksellers and via online retailers via her website mjmilne.com.
