E Jean Carroll, Mary Trump, and Jennifer Taub are co-writing a romance novel

‘The Italian Lesson’ will be serialised on newsletter platform Substack

E Jean Carroll, Mary Trump, and the lawyer and author Jennifer Taub are working on a romance novel together.

The project was announced by The New York Times on Thursday (1 June). Carroll, Trump, and Taub also shared more information on Substack, the newsletter platform where the novel will be published in instalments.

Trump described the novel to The New York Times as a “completely unlikely and weird and counterintuitive” project.

In conversation with the newspaper, and on Substack, Trump, Carroll, and Taub explained that they got to know one another by meeting on Zoom to work on knitting projects.

“We knew each other only by reputation and written work (including books and even tweets), but quickly bonded while texting, talking, and knitting (although to be honest, some of us didn’t really knit at all),” they wrote on Substack.

They originally thought of writing a screenplay for a Hallmark movie together, but “nothing came of this plan for a while,” they said on Substack. What eventually came out of their collaboration was The Italian Lesson, a romance novel set in a fictional village in Tuscany.

Trump did the writing, with input from Caroll and Taub, according to The New York Times.

The novel will be released in serialised form on Substack on Tuesdays and Fridays. Trump, Carroll, and Taub plan to have released it in full within a year, after which they will share another project. Access to The Italian Lesson and bonus content will be free for three weeks, until 23 June, after which the newsletter will switch to a paid tier.

Trump is a psychologist with a PhD in clinical psychology. She is also the niece of Donald Trump, of whom she has been a vocal critic. She has previously published two books: Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man in 2020, and The Reckoning: Our Nation's Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal in 2021.

Carroll, a writer and advice columnist, has written several books, including the 2019 What Do We Need Men For?: A Modest Proposal. She recently won a defamation and sexual abuse lawsuit against Donald Trump.

Taub, a lawyer, legal scholar, and advocate, is the author of two books, most recently the 2020 Big Dirty Money: The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime.