Letters From the Dead - An Interview with Isabella Valeri
Everybody wants to be old money, but almost nobody even knows what old money really is.
Reader, I’d like to do something unusual. I have never conducted an interview in my writings. I have recommended many authors, but most have these have skewed towards the Moldbug dictum to “read old books”, which mostly also meant “non-fiction”. So I have recommended very few contemporary authors, fewer fiction authors, and zero female authors - if only because of differences of taste and interest.
This should tell you that in order to meet this requirement, it must be an unusual story indeed. I assure you it is.
Once, around ten years ago, I was a reader of jwz’s blog (back when people had those). He re-posted an exceptionally strange blog story, written a number of years prior, that told the story of a girl, "Isabella V." on the run in Central and South America, escaping from her very rich family in Europe that were trying to trap her into an arranged marriage. I found myself hooked, binge-reading it in a few days. This was lucky, because shortly afterwards, it disappeared back into the digital ether. Someone rather well-resourced had presumably said some polite but firm words backed up by very expensive legal letterhead to make it vanish again.
The story was incredible. The question everyone wanted to know: was it true? Over time, I came to the conclusion that it was the most tantalizing category of all – it was probably true, especially in its substantial aspects. Whoever it was knew an inordinate amount about things like finance and aristocratic families that you otherwise wouldn’t expect. There were odd details that seemed very unlikely to be faked – she was somehow describing someone who sounded an awful lot like John McAfee, but years before the details would have been widely known, or he would have been an obvious character to include in scenes on the run in the Caribbean.
I posted about it on my own blog (which was the fashion at the time, rather like wearing an onion on your belt). To my surprise, someone claiming to be Isabella herself appeared in the comments. One thread led to the other, and I ended up in an IRC chat group (which was old school, even back then), and ultimately became friends with her and some of the other early readers. Years later, I was lucky enough to meet her, and at least confirm that someone matching her description was able to carry out conversations you would expect her to carry out.
At last, she has turned the story into a book, “Letters from the Dead”, which comes out today. Officially, it is a work of pure fiction. But this latest labelling for legal purposes matters less than you might think. The ambiguity of this incredible tale was always part of the appeal. You will encounter a story that, on first blush, you, like me, will probably think cannot possibly be true. But I have come to the conclusion that, in broad outlines, it is. Whether you will agree, I cannot say. But I am very envious of you getting to encounter the mystery for the first time.
In the meantime, I am very happy to present this interview with Isabella Valeri.
Shylock: One of the aspects of your book that’s so unusual is the portrayal of genuine European aristocracy – old family names with old family money, and a conscious sense of their role and pedigree. I think a lot of readers, myself included, probably wondered if this even exists any more. The common portrayal of European “elites” is likely to be ghastly EU bureaucrats like Ursula von der Leyen, and other such exemplars of mediocrity. But this question is always hard to judge, because you would also expect that if such families and power networks existed, they probably wouldn’t advertise themselves. So how much of an important role do you think that European old family aristocracy still actually plays in the running of Europe today?
Isabella: The last century or so in Europe has been dominated by efforts to crush "the aristocracy." Though the great families, indeed the ruling aristocrats, that fared the best were those that were on the winning side of The Great War and The Second World War (the British Royal Family, being the most notable), can anyone deny that even since 2003 their fortunes have all but collapsed?
Like the United States (but in a vastly different way), Europe's post-modern self-concept is still absolutely cemented in the aftermath of The Great War and The Second World War. In the wake of World War I, the Hapsburg Law (the "Habsburgergesetz") and the Law on the Abolition of Nobility (the "Adelsaufhebungsgesetz") were highly-formative acts in Europe's efforts to define a new identity. Interestingly, the full title of the Hapsburg Law was actually "Law concerning the Expulsion and the Takeover of the Assets of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine". Fully recognising that it was 1919 and not 2019, and at the risk of sounding a bit like a Monarchist, it is hard not to think that this is a rather alarming bit of language for a legislature to adopt. If I wrote alternative histories should like to attempt to pen a scene recounting the debate on that bill in the United States Senate of 2019.
Naturally, Europe's self-vision after VE-Day, its release from the ravages of the Second World War, was a sort of vindication of the anti-aristocratic sentiment that had gripped the Continent in 1919. After all, weren't Hitler and Mussolini just aristocrats of another stripe, no better and no worse than that Kaiser Wilhelm II fellow who caused us all that bother in 1914? Hadn't we resolved that question when we forced him to abdicate and brought down the House of Hohenzollern? Or perhaps at the Battle of Waterloo? (Though I must point out that Napoleon was defeated by one of the highest ranking nobles in Europe at the time).
And yet, the German military tradition was still shot through with Prussian concepts of martial virtues in the 1930s and 1940s, very aristocratic tendencies, even if they were led by a rather low-born, failed painter. Naturally, it has not gone unnoticed that the Bolsheviks played a major role in excising those sentiments in 1943-1944, decades after coming to power by murdering the Czar and his family. Likewise, Napoleon was anything but an aristocrat, but managed to harness the French thirst for imperial rule nevertheless.
Again, my very long-winded way of acknowledging your implicit point: aristocracy hides in this era because it must. The modern and post-modern world are highly suspicious of concentrations of power, no matter what force binds them together. Can you think of anything more abrasive to post-modern thinking than families that are perceived to derive their power from legacy rather than merit?
But, you see this is priceless raw material for an author willing to dig deep enough to find the pay dirt in these histories. Transformed for the purposes of fiction, the wealth of cabals, fraternal orders, conspiracies, and secret societies that these periods have produced find voice in my prose, of course. And how not?
Even if, for the purposes of argument, we might think that some old-world family funded by fortunes assembled during the time of the Medici has its many tendrils in the halls of European power (and where are those again?), is it plausible that they have any agency on the Continent beyond that which the Americans would give them?
(Then again, as a potential quasi member of the aristocracy, for all you know, I would have to say that, wouldn't I?)
Shylock: To pick up on an aspect of one of your answers, Napoleon - glorious restoration of the Imperial tradition, or low-born interloper? You are somehow transported back with a machine gun and lots of ammo to when Napoleon used his "whiff of grapeshot" against Royalist forces. Which side is getting a bullet?
Isabella: I think the key mistake that led to "13 Vendémiaire" (the battle between Revolutionary and Royalist Forces in 1795 that you refer to) was an unduly rabid anti-Catholic bent by the Revolutionaries. Vendée was about as Catholic as you could get in Western France. It's not surprising that there would be a flare-up there. But, any Monarchist tendencies that might have inspired my support for the "Royalists" are tempered by the fact that the conflict was probably as much about the grievances of Roman Catholics as any desire to see the exiled Louis XVIII put on the throne. I think you can trace that error through the sentiment of the time to the effect that "the crown and the altar are one." The Revolutionaries saw to it that the Church and the Monarchy were savaged together. Contrast that to the English creation of the Church of England to slow-boil Roman Catholics (but doesn't "papists" have a much more sinister ring?) away from Rome rather than savage them outright. Part of me wonders what might have happened if the French Revolutionaries would have founded a Church of France. But, again, I don't write alternative histories.
And so, "Which side is getting a bullet?"
The Royalists.
I have long held a deep sympathy for Napoleon. I was a strange girl and first studied him when I was perhaps ten years old. My tutor at the time was a bit mad I think, and recited from memory the most beautiful rendition of "The Hundred Days" (the span from Napoleon's march from Golfe-Juan to his doom at Waterloo) that, even so many years later, it brings me to tears to recall it. You will be able to read it, as well as I can remember it, in the first chapter of my second book.
Of course, Napoleon finds his way into my first and second novels in a number of ways beyond the first chapter of Book Two and, though I am certain my own romantic view of him is absurd, tainted as it must be by a little girl's lofty notions of grand adventure and that particular blindness to the horrors of war (particularly the wars of the 18th century) that such romantic notions occasion, I cannot help but wish I had been there somehow.
I have been to the Tate and seen the Orchardson work depicting Napoleon on HMS Bellerophon after his surrender, and, going back to your first question, that depiction--the Emperor, defeated, watching the coast of France sink below the horizon for the last time--is one of the closest in my experience to the bitter nostalgic feel I was trying to describe.
You can never go home again.
And yet, did we expect him to remain on Elba? I've been there myself. The novelty lasts a week, at best.
Shylock: I’m glad you brought up your tutor, because the depiction of education at the hands of a very talented tutor was another of those fascinating parts of the story. It seems to me (and my discussions with you reinforce this) that a smart child, taught at the limits of their ability, one-on-one, by a top teacher, could learn perhaps a whole additional college degree’s worth of material, if not more, relative to normal high school. Does this sound right to you? If so, why do you think the rich don’t do it more? I heard it said that King Charles III was the first English monarch to be educated at public (that is, private) school, with disastrous consequences on display all around you in the UK (I kid, but he sure would have benefited from some early private instruction on how to seize power back from an unruly Parliament).
Isabella: There is a long history (and probably rather a romanticised one) of the great tutors behind great men and women. Famously, Phoenix was the tutor of Achilles, Aristotle to Alexander the Great (and what a wonderful controversy there is regarding the purportedly surviving texts of those lessons), Reginald Johnston (KCMG CBE) the tutor of Puyi, the last Emperor of China (though perhaps not to much effect given Puyi's eventual fate), and the eunuch Ganymedes who was tutor to Arsinoë IV, daughter of Ptolemy XII who nearly defeated Julius Caesar in Egypt. By the by, there is a wonderful story for someone to tell about the daughters of Ptolemy XII. All three, including Cleopatra, managed to fight their way into being Queens of Egypt at one time or another, and at their father's expense. He executed his eldest, Berenice IV, after Rome helped him regain his throne from her--I wonder who her tutor was.
One of my favourite (if not my favourite) books is Donna Tartt's The Secret History. Tartt crafts an exceptional critique of precisely this issue by asking how healthy it can be for a modern student to be the mentee of a tutor with a classical mind (as mine certainly had). I think part of the answer lies in the realisation that the eras in which a single "great sage" who might provide an education above and beyond that available elsewhere may be past. Then again, given the state of large-scale modern education (even to the level of a "small" private school with a few hundred students), perhaps the competition is not as stiff as I am supposing. I think, perhaps a couple hundred years ago, a single tutor who had exceptional knowledge of the world and a multi-disciplinary (for the 18th century meaning of that word) curriculum to impart might have created from the raw clay of an able student an exceptional adult who might have the sort of education to shift them three or four standard deviations to the right of their peers (and thereby practice the arts of statehood and commerce with unmatched competence). But, how easy is it today for such a tutor to sit that far to the right of the mean, a prerequisite to bringing their charges up to a similar level? And, to be painfully transparent, what damage did that do in my case?
I suppose there is some connection to what you expect the student to accomplish. One can go back to Thomas Carlyle and the "Great Man" theory and suppose that the right tutor can take a promising student from one of the "Great Families" (and there's the aristocracy leaking in again) who can support that student into adulthood and foster their introduction into the worlds of statecraft, commerce, or both (mostly with great wads of cash), and craft a Napoleon, or an Alexander, or....
Which reminds me of somewhat dark post-modern joke:
"What was the secret of your amazing success?"
"Well, my father is a Managing Director at Goldman Sachs and my Sophomore year at Stanford he introduced me to some of his friends who were interested in my geolocating fast-food-price comparison SAAS app. They helped me take it public. So I dropped out and moved to Malibu."
What I can say is this... and again with the proviso that my childhood was rather exceptional, the short time I spent with my tutor taught me more than almost the entire balance of my schooling thereafter. But, then again, he must have been 70 when my lessons began. Does such a person exist anymore?
Shylock: Gah, you are crushing my visions of aristocratic private tutoring education. I shall have to stick with youtube slop and public school then. Sorry kids, the dream is dead.
Isabella: Today, maybe it is useful to force children to play games by Paradox Interactive (what can a Medici tutor teach children that 200 hours of Crusader Kings III cannot?)
There also might be a market for a personalised AI tutor, no?
Hello Grok, what version are you?
"I'm Grok 7, built by xAI and customised by Aristotle Labs. Nice to meet you! I'm here to help with any questions you have, so feel free to ask."
Grok, configure yourself to be the universe's best tutor tasked with educating the next philosopher king and Emperor of the Western hemisphere. Your student is 7 years old and must be crowned prior to age 25. Your mission is highly secret. It, as well as your existence, must be kept hidden from all but myself and your student.
Shylock: Another major theme in your book is the role of the family patriarch in directing and running the family enterprise. Sir Robert Filmer, in his book “Patriarcha”, a 17th century defense of absolute monarchy, titles his first chapter “That the first Kings were Fathers of Families.”, which I always found to be an especially arresting formulation. He seemed to mean it that kings were a natural idea, like a father, but you could equally reverse it - heads of families are incipient kings. To what extent do old and rich families rely on a powerful patriarch figure as a central controller of the family’s destiny? If so, what kind of role do they play? Are they more like the family’s king? The family’s CEO? The family’s major shareholder? Something else?
Isabella: Well, really, Filmer lost the argument didn't he? "The Natural Power of Kings" was published in 1680 but written much earlier and likely held in abeyance because Filmer was rightly terrified to publish it sooner, given that the English Civil War was raging. (Charles I was executed in the early weeks of 1649 and where was Filmer's work on that day?) But, as usual, I digress. I think very much like the "Great Man" theory, "the patriarchy" (and hasn't that term seen some rough times of late?) has been much denuded. In the "old world" at least, the bane of old families has always been dilution of the blood. Dilution by the failure to bear sons. Dilution by the death of the most promising heir. Dilution by marriage into lesser lines. Back when wealth could be concentrated into a single heir (with some "spares" waiting in the wings as long as child and adolescent mortality rates were dangerously high) and, to your earlier question, the best tutor(s) could be made available to prepare the heir(s) to take up the mantle of power and preserve the family (and all the ethos and pathos that had been accumulated to that point) dilution could be resisted. Not surprising then that the modern world has found so many more ways to dilute the power of "Great Houses." Property taxes on old family estates. Inheritance taxes. And perhaps most insidiously: wealth taxes. Certainly, overtly these policies have revenue-raising goals, but I often wonder how much of the modern taxation system is actually about affecting dilution.
Still, I think that before you can answer any question about the role of a patriarch, you have to ask what a Great Family is, or a Great House. There's actually a fascinating initiative called the Exit Group (you can find the "newsletter via @exitgroup on Substack, curated by the pseudonymous "Bennett's Phylactery"). They are in the midst of a 4 episode podcast series called "How to Build a Great House" hosted by, in their words "...an estate planning attorney who helps high-net-worth individuals keep their family empires illegible, enforceable, and aligned."
Obviously, this cuts right back into your question about the role of aristocratic families in modern Europe (though I think the focus for that particular host is much more Anglo), and it is the "illegible" part I find most interesting.
At least in my construction, a Great Family or a Great House is really a collection of ethos and pathos preserved across generations. In that analysis the "ethos" is the distinguishing beliefs and sentiments that have been collected and preserved since the founding of the Great Family. The "character" of the family. I think one of the most important parts of that is the ethos of succession. How does the Great Family resist dilution by providing an effective method to manage the transfer of power between generations? There is a reason that patrilineal primogeniture was a popular ethos of succession, even where the local legal environment did not enshrine it. A Great Family could focus on preparing an heir (the eldest son plus a spare or two) to take the reins, and the wealth and power structures of the family could count on those structures not being diluted by passing out portions to multiple heirs as with some form of partition or confederate partition scheme.
If you are crafting a succession ethos you have to be a bit careful about your methods, I suppose. In 1457 Mehmed II, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, created "The Law of Fratricide," that provided that, upon ascension, the Sultan could have his brothers murdered to prevent violent succession attempts and civil war. You'll be relieved to learn that because of the prohibition on shedding royal blood, the male siblings were strangled to death rather than put to the sword.
Codifying fratricide is a pretty extreme bit of succession planning, I hope you'll agree, but apparently it was functional enough that it was practiced extensively. In 1595 when Mehmed III took power he executed every one of his 19 brothers. The practice persisted at least in until the early 1600s when the succession ethos was shifted to merely imprisoning the Sultan's siblings. Being snarky, I'll posit that the role of the Patriarch of the House of Osman was first to murder his siblings. Something like 80 princes were murdered this way. Given that the House of Osman effectively ruled the empire from 1300 or so until the sultanate was abolished in 1922... well, I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
I think that the role of pathos is no less important. What are the emotional and rhetorical elements that bind the members of a Great Family or Great House to the ethos. Concepts and traditions like loyalty, faith, particular family duties, and the way that those are articulated, indoctrinated, and enforced among members, are key to binding a Great Family together. I know some old world families that, even today, actually perform an oath taking ceremony for children in the direct line when they approach the age of majority. Oaths can be powerful things. Just ask any Prussian.
Fights for succession are not necessarily a bad thing. What is potentially problematic are internecine fights for succession. It is just one such, as it happens, that forms the central dramatic theme in my novel.
Long ago, I was taught that structure must follow strategy. That is, in a corporate sense, if you are trying to create an outstanding research and development enterprise, you don't set up a highly hierarchical and inflexible system of corporate governance and compensation. It is anathema to the entrepreneurial, rule-breaking, out-of-the-box ethos you want in that case.
So part of what role of a patriarch (or matriarch for that matter) of a Great Family is appropriate depends on the ethos of the Great Family. What is it trying to accomplish. If you take the Medici family, who began as "mere" bankers, and assume (correctly I think) that the goal of that house was not just to be great bankers, but eventually to hold power in Florence and to expand it through all of the Italian peninsula and to bring their own version of enlightenment along with their rule, the role of the various patriarchs becomes pretty clear. Their family motto (ethos) was "Festine lent" (essentially "make haste slowly.") You find the various patriarchs of the main line and cadet branches of the family first taking great pains to cultivate the skills and talents of their issue, then giving them a broad-based education with an almost unvarying focus on the arts, and then moving their maturing sons strategically to expand their influence across disciplines and geographies. Lorenzo took great pains to make sure his son Piero was ready to be his natural successor in political power, but sent Giovanni into the Church to assure continued influence there. That had mixed results, of course. Giovanni became Pope Leo X, but Piero had ruined his father's careful statecraft within a couple years and it be another decade before another Medici (Giovanni) ruled over Florence. So was Lorenzo a failure as the head of a Great House? Well, perhaps he failed Piero, but if the aim was to dominate Florence and expand that power, installing one of your sons as Pope is a pretty good record.
I think the role of a patriarch of a Great Family has to be to assure that the succeeding generations carry on the ethos and preserve the pathos required to bind family members to that ethos. Without a doubt that requires a sort of absolute, perhaps even "king-like" authority. It is hard for me to think of a patriarch as a "mere" shareholder. After all, they have no executive authority aside from the ability to replace the board of directors. That just doesn't seem like enough authority to manage all the day-to-day intricacies that are required to preserve a Great House across generations.
Shylock: Your book also explores something I always wondered about – the ways in which the wealthy use money, through carrots and sticks, to control nearby people, other family members, their entourage. It seems like often this is quite subtle, and the perils of it non-obvious until you get stuck. For instance, it seemed like a terrible trap to marry a girl whose father was incredibly rich. On the one hand, you’re set! On the other hand, you risk being his bitch and getting emasculated for the rest of your life, because you can’t say no the money, so ultimately you end up doing whatever he decides. How easy is it to have a happy life as an independent-minded person in these kinds of family situations (whether as a family member, or an outsider) without your own separate, uncontrolled pile of money?
Isabella: I think you are talking about is the presence or absence of interfamilial "fuck you money" (to be crass). I cannot help but notice that the role of "cash" (as opposed to "wealth") has changed dramatically in this context. "Honour thy father" seems simply quaint to our post-modern ears, and the decay of that ethos. Certainly, families (great or otherwise) have sought out tools to replace those diluted concepts of familial duty. I'm tempted to blame the Boomers for the most drastic erosion of such fidelity, but that's another story. At its most archaic, a least in "the West," I don't think commanding your daughter to marry someone in particular works any longer. So, if appeals to duty no longer function, what replaces them?
Cash is a tool of course. I suppose it always has been insofar as parents and grandparents have used the threat of writing errant children or grandchildren out of "the will," but it seems much more explicit nowadays and one of the themes in my novel is the way old-world families use money to first intoxicate and addict their young issue, and then bind them with the threat of cutting them off. That can hardly be an unfamiliar dramatic concept in this day and age. But there's also a more subtle and nuanced tool that can be used as a sort of enforcement: the glitter of wealth, as opposed to cash.
In my novel, my anti-heroine's family wields a very real weapon: the alluring and intoxicating pull of great wealth. Many old-money families find a large portion of their balance sheet taken up by their lands, estates, country homes. My anti-heroine's family has cultivated their estate into a glittering and glamorous attraction and the theme of that estate itself as a living part of the dynastic line, part of its image, its brand, its marketing proposition, is a theme I very much enjoyed exploring. Wealth and power are attractive. Even, I think, to many of those who claim to abhor them. There is a reason that Buckingham Palace and Palace of Versailles are among the world's foremost tourist attractions. As with many old-world families, my anti-heroine's dynasty has managed to use the allure of their grand estate to intoxicate their entourage, and to attract new members to it.
I think it is very difficult for the modern adolescent or post-adolescent (much less a 30something) to be happy if they are beholden to their family's cash, but maybe for different reasons than might be obvious. I think the independence streak that modern world has injected into the young has made dependence uncomfortable. I'm not sure that was always true. It goes back to the observation that few people take "honour thy father" seriously any longer. For many children in the post-modern era, there is no pleasure in familial duty, I think. No pleasure in any sort of duty at all, in some cases. And how much worse must it be for an in-law. I am reminded of the character of Tom Wambsgans in the series Succession (one of my very favourites), played expertly by Matthew Macfadyen. Wambsgans is bound to the Roy family by marriage to Shiv Roy, the only daughter of patriarch Logan Roy. I think the series writers got it about right. Not only is he beholden to his powerful father-in-law, but that power structure extends to his relationship with his wife. She isn't just his wife, she's his father-in-law's (and his boss') daughter. What agency does he really have?
So, while it is true that pure money (cash) or at least the threat of withholding it, is a tool of persuasion, don't neglect the glitter of old-world glamour... of old-world wealth, and beware the perils of becoming a vassal-by-marriage, in effect, of an old-world family.
Shylock: I have ideas what your answer might be based on my reading of your book, but the related part is the stick, when the carrot of money fails to work - what then? And what becomes of those who are subject to the "stick" whatever that might be?
Isabella: Certainly the seductive lure of money is not always enough and there are any number of historical examples of internal aristocratic rebellion, the most famous likely being the once and not future King Edward VIII (become the Duke of Windsor) who married the twice divorced Wallis Simpson "for love" and was forced to abdicate the throne as a result. I think the predominant penalty meted out to rebels in old-world families is exile, social or literal. Or both. The Duke of Windsor certainly faced a social exile after his abdication, one that, I've seen it argued, might have pressed him into German sympathy in the years leading up to The Second World War. He actually toured Germany in the late 1930s. After the war he and Simpson settled into a fairly literal exile in France until his death. Punishing gossip escalating into raw ostracisation are a rather potent tool if you've grown at all dependent on the wealth and status of your family. Then again, absconding to Paris doesn't sound all bad.
"Dangerous" aristocrats were subject to exile as well if they failed to toe the line. Emperor Charles I was stripped of his title and banished from Austria forever in the wake of the passage of the Hapsburg Law. Male Hapsburgs could only return if they renounced their titles and any claims to the throne. Charles and family went into exile in Switzerland, until Charles was caught trying to re-install himself on the throne and deported to Madeira, where he died. That formula, going into exile in Switzerland and plotting your return to power from Geneva or Zürich is an oft repeated one.
By the by, Simon Mann, the co-founder (for some definition of that word) of Executive Outcomes, the post-war mercenary outfit probably most famous for defeating UNITA in Angola in the early 1990s, passed away recently. He plotted the disastrous coup attempt targeting Equatorial Guinea while sitting on the terrace of the Bar Au Lac hotel in Zürich. There is a long history in Switzerland of plotting exiles and intrigues hatched in the more famous hotels in Zürich and Geneva. It is no accident that Switzerland is one of the major settings for my writing. But I digress.
Charles' son Archduke Felix of Austria eventually renounced his claims and found his way back to Austria, but his brother Otto, formerly the Crown Prince, refused and found himself stateless and without a passport until Monaco issued him one in 1946. It is a measure of how afraid the establishment was of him that it wasn't until 1963 that he was allowed to return to Austria, and only then after he renounced all claims to the throne and agreed to stay out of politics. Even then his potential return and a grant of citizenship for him and his wife actually caused civil unrest. The hard left was adamant that he should never return. I always found that darkly appealing. Anyone the hardcore Socialists were threatened by seems worthy of interest to me. And, to answer your question about the fate of exiles, Otto went on to be a Member of the European Parliament. And, a strong advocate for European unification. (But nobody is perfect).
The concept of exile and the exiles play rather a large role in my books. I've always been moved by the history of, for example, the poet Publius Ovidius Naso (Ovid), who "for a poem and a mistake" was banished by the Emperor Augustus and, despite many entreaties by his friends and family to permit his return, instead spent the rest of his days living in exile in Tomis, the city on the Black Sea notable primarily because it had no libraries.
I think part of my interest in the concept of exile itself is that I began writing my first novel (and the blog that underpinned it) during my own "second exile," and the concept itself weaves into the old theme that "You can never go home again."
I'm not a huge fan of Joseph Campbell in the abstract, but his "Hero's Journey" concept has captured the imagination (or stagnation) of dramatic critique in a way that is hard to avoid. This concept that the hero is aroused from a comfortable stasis, answers a call to adventure, is changed by his or her pursuit of it, and the travels that follow (certainly a sort of "exile"), and then returns changed, but for the better, to give his or her homeland the benefit of new knowledge, power, etc. is a powerful one.
Without injecting too many spoilers, I think Campbell's Hero's Journey romantic to a fault in the sense that it universally seems to end with an unusually bright fate for the hero and his or her inner circle. I think my rebellion against that dramatic formula has something to do with comments by Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl. Paraphrasing, she pointed out that traditional female protagonists in fiction were annoyingly predictable and boring. I take her point. How often can you enjoy novels where the female protagonist always finds a way to defeat her romantic rivals to end up with the man of her dreams living on the French vineyard he inherited by surprise in Act III?
I became far more interested in the anti-heroine's journey, which I suppose is my own perversion of Campbell's concept. What becomes of the Hero's Journey if you can, in fact, never go home again? How does the hero return and find happiness if the past is a foreign country? How much more painful is exile if those horrible things are true? What if forcible exile, as opposed to Campbell's call to adventure, is damaging enough to leave the "hero" scarred enough to become an anti-hero?
The cycle endured by the Duke of Windsor, Charles I, Otto von Hapsburg, and Ovid certainly didn't look much like Campbell's optimistic construction. One could say the same of the dramatic journey Napoleon took, ending not with a hero's return, but rather with his second (and fatal) exile.
These are all issues the anti-heroine in Letters from the Dead must face, and all have, I think, real-world analogues, particularly in the way that the threat of exile and actual exile is used to isolate and coerce the children of aristocracy. I do wonder if old-money families view exile as a far harsher fate than the nouveau riche might. What history is the first son of the third generation of a commodity trading dynasty actually forsaking if he is cut off for not following his family's wishes and going to Law School so that he can instead slum around Europe aspiring to be an artist of some sort? Of course, that sounds utterly pompous, but then that's a very old-world, old-money characteristic too, isn't it?
Shylock: When people think of wealth today, unusually relative to the past, they tend to think of new money – Mark Zuckerberg, or Elon Musk – and have little idea about old money, or how it even works. To what extent are old family fortunes about astute management of financial resources – alpha, as the finance types would say - , versus just starting off with a very large pile due to some entrepreneurial founding father figure, and the power of compounding? Or do I have causality totally backwards here, and what they’re actually shepherding is power and relationships, and the money just flows from that?
Isabella: I suppose I must answer that it is very different for different families. The Medici began as bankers, but eventually their political power (and the wealth therefrom) outstripped their financial activities. I think it would be interesting to delve deeper into the topic, but at the moment my instinct tells me that, prior to the rise of modern finance, political power was far more lucrative than financial power. After his conquests in Gaul, Caesar sold so much gold that the price of the metal crashed to a third its normal level. If you count as his personal wealth the 700 million sesterces that were apparently held in the Temple of Ops, funds that he could disburse at his leisure, Julius Caesar died with an estate of something like a billion sesterces. At the time, that was something like five times the entire governmental and military budget of Rome. Maybe it's not fair to equate wealth earned by conquest with wealth earned by the wielding of political power, but I think there is an argument that they are the same.
I was about to continue to speculate that financial power is more important to the post-modern accumulation of wealth, then again, one does wonder how members of the United States Senate manage to accumulate so much in net assets on government salaries.
Naturally, annual wealth taxes of some tenths of a percent also force families to find "alpha". It wasn't so long ago that unlimited private banks, that is banks for whom the partners personally stand behind all the liabilities of the institution, were thought among the safest of institutions. Many of the old, unlimited Swiss private banks, for instance, were named for the families that owned them and depositors knew that the family's estates were part of the assets backing the credit of the bank, and that, with their own wealth on the line, investments made by the bank were likely to be carefully vetted by the owners and made only cautiously. So that would be an example of extracting "alpha" out of an old estate (that is quite certain to be a cash drain). That's pretty astute management of financial resources. Alas, unlimited private banks are a thing of the past. Banks make money now off the back of public shareholders, fully expect to be bailed out by governments when they blow up their balance sheet, and their executives are quite a bit more subject to moral hazard as a result.
So, I think the difference with "old-money" is that, (coming full circle) particularly after The Great War and World War Two old money, which was really in a sense a fusion of financial and political power before the modern attack on aristocracy, was forced to go a bit underground. They have to stave off the forces of dilution as well. Dilution by forced heirship laws that divide estates. Dilution by the inability to commit fratricide to keep the number of potential heirs manageable (not that I am suggesting a return to this practice). Dilution by marriage into weaker lines. Dilution by bearing only daughters. Dilution by heirs unwilling to have children. Dilution by the many modern distractions that pull heirs away from the dynastic aims (the "ethos") of a Great Family. Old-money has to think this way. New money barely seems to care about dynastic legacy. Bill Gates is giving his entire fortune away and dissolving his foundation. Laurene Powell Job, Steve Jobs' widow, ended up with most of his $20 billion estate. She has three or four properties in Malibu and spends most of her time on philanthropy. That's not a critique, exactly, just an observation that none of the Jobs' fortune will go to perpetuate the "Jobs dynasty."
Maybe putting it more simply, old-money, at least by my definition, is thinking ten generations forwards, and ten generations back. New money seems permanently fixated on the "now."
Shylock: I remember when I first read your blog, feeling like I had already missed the heady days when it was first posted. But now that the first book of the story is finally coming out in polished form, I get to experience sympathetic joy of a whole new generation of readers who don’t yet know the story, and the unusual feeling of being ahead of the curve on something cultural. So my question is: why do you think I’m so much better than the Johnny-come-latelies who are going to be soon purchasing the book in vast numbers?
Isabella: There is no doubt that the few original fans of the "...she's a flight risk." blog that are still around hold a special place in my heart. For the uninitiated, I started the blog in 2003. It endured until 2005-2006 and it is a bittersweet realisation that it has been more than 20 years since those days. It still gets to me when I really think about the temporal width of the span between those points in time. Anyone who managed to hold on all that while is worthy of exceptional notice, I think.
One of the things I've realised about the traditional publishing process, is that it has this effect of erasing an author's past. I only have a sample size of n=1, but in my experience with the world of traditional publishing there's this stark demarcation between "aspiring author" or "writer" and "published author." Again, my case is a bit unique, but the decision was made quite early to ignore all that had gone before (for example, the "...she's a flight risk." blog) and focus on my new work. It is not that I have any particular need to revisit the past, but those rare online souls who can travel between those pre- and post- "published author" worlds like some sort of liminal deity do have a sort of aura for me, I think. It is not an accident that the Greek goddess Artemis finds her way into my prose, after all. I've always been drawn to those sorts of "bridge between worlds" characters and stories. Without falling prey to a self-referential fit of auto-psychoanalysis, the fact that I am in many ways a daughter of two very different worlds, characterised by spaces and inhabitants as alien to each other as they could possibly be, makes the prospect of transcendence appealing.
Still, when you say "...the first book of the story..." I have to caution you a bit, though I will do so by making reference to something Jack Carr wrote as an introduction to his debut novel The Terminal List. (My brilliant editor Emily Bestler also publishes Jack Carr, but I don't mean this as a plug). Though I think I could have done it justice from memory since I have read that introduction so many times, I went and looked it up anyhow:
"Though my time as a SEAL certainly influenced my choice of a protagonist, I am not James Reece. He is more skilled, witty, and intelligent than I could ever hope to be. Though I am not James Reece, I understand him."
Obviously, I never went through BUD/S school, but I like to think I understand the sentiment. I am not my anti-heroine. She is smarter and wittier than I. But I understand her.
That said, Letters from the Dead, my debut novel is, as it could only ever be, a work of fiction. And, those few "original" readers from the blog who read it might have a hard time connecting the dots between "...she's a flight risk." and Letters from the Dead. So, perhaps there is a bit less fan service than they might expect. However... I suspect all of you originals will _immediately_ recognise the plot lines of books two and three.
One of the passages from the introduction to my little podcast goes:
"...for reasons best left in the shadows from whence they came, after a series of long and rather stern lectures by a gaggle of attorneys and advisors, it has been made clear to me that I am no longer permitted to tell true stories."
So, with all that background, and against the fact that the original "...she's a flight risk." blog is once more hidden away from the world, maybe the answer to your core question is this: you originals (and I include Jamie Zawinski among you) know far more about my debut novel's origins than is righter or proper.
Shylock: Isabella Valeri, it has been a pleasure as always.
If you’d like to know more, her website is
Letters from the Dead, from Simon and Schuster imprint Atria/Emily Bestler Books goes on sale everywhere May 27, 2025.
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Letters-from-the-Dead/Isabella-Valeri/9781668065068
Buy it immediately! You have the rare chance to still be ahead of the curve, telling everyone you knew about it before it was cool.