Santini, Rosemarie

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Santini, Rosemarie

PERSONAL:

Born in New York, NY. Education: Attended Hunter College of the City University of New York.

CAREER:

Writer, journalist, poet, and educator. Teacher of fiction and nonfiction workshops in New York, NY; teacher at the New School, New York, NY, c. 1996—.

MEMBER:

Forum, Poets and Writers.

WRITINGS:

Forty-One Grove Street (novel), Curtis Books, 1973.

The Sex Doctors (nonfiction), Pinnacle Books (Edinburgh, Scotland), 1975.

The Secret Fire: How Women Live Their Sexual Fantasies (nonfiction), Playboy Press (Chicago, IL), 1977, reprinted as The Santini Report, Playboy Press (Chicago, IL), 1977.

Abracadabra (novel), Playboy Press (Chicago, IL), 1978.

A Swell Style of Murder (novel), St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1985.

The Disenchanted Diva: A Rick and Rosie Mystery, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1987.

Ask Me What I Want, Fawcett Juniper (New York, NY), 1989.

Sex & Sensibility: The Adventures of a Jane Austen Addict (novel), Saint Books, 2005.

Contributor to periodicals, including Penthouse, Essence, Playboy, and Family Circle, and to newspapers, including New York Daily News.

SIDELIGHTS:

Rosemarie Santini once told CA: "I wish to investigate the matters of the heart—whether personal or cultural—and explore just how and when our human society loses its dreams and gives up its inspiration and aspirations. I identify closely with the French writers like Colette, F. du Plessix Gray, and de Beauvoir, rather than American writers, with the only exception of Joan Didion, who I think is our genius. However, the rhythms of my work are Italian rhythms—the language of my birth." She has written often on the Italian-American theme, particularly on Italian-American women.

In her novel Sex & Sensibility: The Adventures of a Jane Austen Addict, Santini tells the story of Lizzie Parsons, a movie reviewer for a New York newspaper and a Jane Austen worshipper. A member of the JANO club, which stands for "Jane-o-Holics," Lizzie and her fellow members try to live their lives with the same decorum as Austen set forth in her novels. Lizzie soon finds herself falling for two men who, of course, remind her of characters in Austen's novels. In a review of Sex & Sensibility in Publishers Weekly, a reviewer commented that the author "has created a neurotic, zany, plotting character full of kick and spunk." Nora Nachumi, writing in JASNA News, wrote that the novel "is equally indebted to Sex and the City and to Jane Austen's fiction." Nachumi added that the novel "does not pretend to be great literature; it aspires, I think, to be light frothy fun."