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Aly Mennuti is the author of Broken Fortune, which is out now.
Aly Mennuti has always had two passions: philanthropy and literature. She satisfies one of those by being an executive at an international nonprofit consulting firm and has helped a diverse range of high-profile clients reach their philanthropic goals. However, she’s always had a desire to express herself creatively and carve out her own role as a writer in a writing family.
Finally, in her forties (and with two children hitting their teens and deciding Mom is really uncool and not needed to hang out with anymore) she has the time and headspace to tell her own stories. She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband, Nicholas Mennuti, a novelist and screenwriter, their two children, Charlie and Lilly, and their eccentric Goldendoodle, Barry.
Broken Fortune explores the unraveling of a wealthy, blended family forced to reconsider their future together as their world falls apart around them. It’s the ideal read for fans of Succession and The White Lotus.
Let’s get to know Aly as she talks favorite books, inspiration behind Broken Fortune, favorite part to write and more!
What are some of your favorite novels?
My all-time favorite novel is The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. I read it at a time in my life where it totally emotionally resonated with me, like he’d camped out in my head. But of course, he wrote everything I was feeling above and beyond anything I could ever imagine. I constantly return to it.
I also love Graham Greene’s End of the Affair, Richard Russo’s Empire Falls trilogy, and Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road. Sensing a pattern yet? But not to be completely family-relationship-centric, I also love Donna Tartt. The Secret History held me in its spell completely. When I pick up a book I want to escape into an author’s world, I want to feel like they’re my friend leading me on their personal adventure. But most of all, I want to feel. And each of these authors move me more than anything.
When did you know you wanted to become an author?
I come from a very creative family, but since I was the only one who always got “good grades”, I was told I was the “academic child” and sort of isolated from their world. I could never figure out how to merge those two pieces. I always played around with writing; I would work through stories with my husband; I would constantly encourage my children to embrace their creativity. But for some reason, I didn’t take my own advice.
That changed a few years ago, when the kids became young adults, and I really had a crisis. (It’s an ongoing one I’ve come to realize, peaking now as my youngest heads to college in the fall). I felt rudderless, fading, like my identity was disappearing. I keep succeeding at work yet felt like I hadn’t accomplished the one thing that would make me whole, that I wanted more than anything.
So, I just sat down and wrote. I poured everything I’d wanted to say, my heart and soul onto the pages. Right there in black and white. I created my own characters and their world, and just escape. And it felt right, like the thing I needed desperately. Finally, at 42 years old, I did the thing I’d always wanted to. The one thing that was always inside me straining to get out.
What inspired you to write Broken Fortune?
Honestly – and my family will hate me for this – but it was them. I grew up in a blended family in a time when I was the only kid in my grade whose parents were divorced. It defined me. That feeling of being estranged. It still does to this day.
When the pandemic hit and I wasn’t surrounded by my family on a regular basis, I finally had the space to explore my feelings about the situation. And from that crisis – personal and global – Broken Fortune was born. Obviously, the characters aren’t actually us, but everything Elizabeth feels and says: I’ve felt and or said.
My hope was to take the scrupulously specific and hopefully turn it into something universal, as if no matter who you are or where you are, you would see a piece of your own family in the Bernard-Sunderland’s. I know there are others out there who have felt as lonely as I have, and I suppose I wrote it for them as well. It’s like the David Foster Wallace quote: “We read to feel less alone.”
It’s all so bittersweet. My children’s own literary doppelgangers are in the book at the exact age they were when I wrote it. My own way of freezing them in time. To always have them be at an age where they still exist at home.
What was your favorite chapter or part to write?
The last chapter. And not because it took me over two years and four rewrites to finish the book. But because I think I found an honesty that felt organic to the characters and how they would end their journey. In novels, we often look for a happily ever after that isn’t guaranteed in life. That isn’t to say that the Bernard-Sunderland’s don’t find closure, but they found it in their own unique manner.
How important is the setting when crafting a novel?
It depends. In Broken Fortune, the setting — as in Graham Greene — is as much a psychological landscape as it is topographical. It’s an essential aspect to the larger themes of birth and rebirth, the flux of the sea mirroring their emotional states, and the sheer size of the ocean as their isolation. But even more, it stands in for the generational conflicts played out writ large in the novel: the desire to conserve versus the desire for never ending creative destruction, represented by Elizabeth and her parents who seemingly never left Ronald Reagan’s 1980s.
What are you currently reading and what’s on your TBR (to be read) list?
I just finished Rebecca Serle’s Expiration Dates. I’m so impressed at how she combines high-concept almost magical realist plotlines with nuanced character development. I devour them in one sitting. My daughter and I have set a summer project to read Pride and Prejudice. I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never read Jane Austen’s most famous novel. Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting is sitting on my bedside table, as is The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer. One or both of them are going on a plane ride to Chicago with me this week.
