Mother-Daughter Writing Duo To Make Book-Signing Stop On East End

Gearing up for her first official book tour with her daughter, Lisa Scottoline went shopping for an outfit to bring to their book signing. The 59-year-old Ms. Scottoline spotted the perfect tailored blazer. It would look great on her freshly graduated Harvard daughter, Francesca Serritella.

But when Ms. Serritella saw a matching blazer on her mother, she was mortified.

“Won’t that be great? Mother-daughter blazers!” said Ms. Scottoline.

Instead, Ms. Serritella reminisced, “She gave me a gift that was actually like being completely embarrassed for your first book tour.”

“I still don’t see it her way!” Ms. Scottoline said. “When we tell that story at a signing, all the moms go, ‘Aw, that’s so cute. What a great idea!’ And all the daughters are going, ‘Are you out of your mind?’”

But Ms. Serritella sees it differently: “Even that’s delusional! When we tell that story, everyone gasps and recoils in horror. Everybody’s on my side—but she interprets it as if it was like a 50-50 split.”

The two sit in separate rooms at Ms. Scottoline’s farmhouse in Malvern, Pennsylvania—a true respite for the 28-year-old Ms. Serritella, a New York City resident—as they traded observations about their mother-daughter collaboration in a phone interview.

They will be gearing up for their fifth tour after the release of “Have a Nice Guilt Trip” on July 8. The two will be speaking and signing books at both BookHampton and the Quogue Library on Sunday, July 20.

“Nobody knows more about guilt than women” is the first line of Ms. Scottoline’s introductory chapter, which begins a collection of tell-all essays in book number five of their mother-daughter series.

What started as “Chick Wit,” a candid column in the Philadelphia Inquirer about motherhood, narrated through the eyes of a New York Times best-selling author, Ms. Scottoline turned into the non-fiction, intimate look at the daily lives of modern women.

Ms. Scottoline got her column gig six years ago while her daughter was still at Harvard studying English and earning top writing honors, like the Charles Edmond Horman Prize, the Baron Russell Briggs Prize and the Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize. That’s when she kept hearing from readers and their own daughters that they wanted to hear from her daughter’s point-of-view.

“You know how when your mother tells a story about you, you’re, like, ‘Wait, wait, wait—that’s not what happened, that’s not how I said it, that’s not what my voice sounded like!’?” Ms. Serritella said, champing at the bit to get her own voice in. “At first I sort of jumped in—like, let me tell my side.”

Now, the ladies have developed an intimate relationship with their readers as they open up their own lives to their beloved audience.

Ms. Scottoline has a long repertoire with readers through her family and crime suspense novels. The lawyer-turned-novelist has spent more than 20 years establishing a name for herself in the writing game.

“I saw her build a writing career from the ground up, starting when I was about 8,” Ms. Serritella said. “I feel so lucky—I’ve always been so lucky to have a mother as a writer who really let me find my own voice and develop my own voice as a writer. And always encouraged me to do so. I had no pressure to follow in her footsteps.”

But following in her mother’s footsteps meant signing on to an almost annual project by putting together collective essays into this light-hearted diary.

When they first sat down together after free writing about their own lives—something Ms. Serritella encourages when working so closely with her mother: “I always joke: Work together, work with your mom, work with family, but do it across state lines. That’s the safest way”—they look at it as a treat, an opportunity to look back at one another’s experiences across their two generations.

“I had written an essay that I had caught myself being really neurotic and reading The New York Times wedding announcements and counting down from my age, being, like, ‘Oh, my God, I’d have to know the guy now!’ Then busting myself on how silly and stupid I was being,” Ms. Serritella said. “And then my mom had written a column—unbeknown to me—about how she reads the obituaries and does the same thing! Then she was, like, calm down. So it was funny to see that we had the same take on those two things.”

The blond-haired, blue-eyed duo isn’t the only mother-daughter pairing in their books. Making quite a name for herself is the matriarch of the family, “Mother Mary.” With this book following the death of Mary Scottoline in April, it reads as an homage to the pioneer of the Scottoline line of strong-willed women. In the last chapter by Ms. Serritella, called “My Grandmother Is Not the Same,” she relates accepting familial changes over eggplant parm.

“They are kind of real-life adventures of a mother and a daughter and a grandmother—my mother!” said Ms. Scottoline. “I can’t talk about my life without reference to [Francesca], and you just couldn’t talk about us without reference to [Mother Mary].”

Even though Mother Mary may not be a leading character, the authors will have three more books before they finish up the series, which has been optioned for TV. “It’s about heart and soul and human intuition,” Ms. Scottoline said of the series. “Because we write about such personal stuff, people really relate.”

Lisa Scottoline and Francesca Serritella will be at BookHampton at 11 a.m. and the Quogue Library at 5 p.m. on Sunday, July 20, for talks with audience members and a book signing. Tickets are $20 and are not guaranteed to be available the day of the event. For more information about BookHampton, call (631) 324-4939, and to contact Quogue Library, call (631) 653-4224.