Drew Bacigalupa

For Having Offended Thee: a Novel Drew Bacigalupa

"The first time I saw Kirstin de Furia after all those years, I thought she was mad." So begins her story told to us by Kirstin's childhood and lifelong friend Frank, a man often exasperated by her irrational actions but bound to her as closely as the men she marries and the children she bears. Kirstin's search for ethnic identity and her love of the arts trigger desertion of her famous husband and brilliant young son in New York to the world of internationally celebrated artists in Italy. She falls in love with painter Paolo Dardi, bears his "love-child," and the world's press-paparazzi, the press, television-launch a scandal from which there's no retreat, and which becomes legend. Set in Manhattan, Florence, Hollywood and Mexico during the second half of the twentieth century, the story is rich with Kirstin's irrepressibly colorful lovers, friends and enemies, her adored children in the not-so-distant time when sexual relationships were rarely considered casual.