Just Asking...Tatiana Boncompagni

Believe it or not, Tatiana Boncompagni has some regrets. Yes, Boncompagni, 31, has just published a new book, Hedge Fund Wives, her second society “chick-lit” novel released within the past nine months, after last fall’s Gilding Lily; and yes, she went to Edina High School and is a direct descendent of Italian nobility and, as family lore has it, Pope Gregory XIII; and yes, she’s a bona fide New York socialite, after graduating from Georgetown and marrying Maximilian Hoover, the millionaire heir to the vacuum-cleaner fortune. But c’mon, everyone has a few things they wish they could do over. “I loved my time going to school in Edina,” says Boncompagni, “but I just wish I would’ve had more fun. I was so focused on getting good grades.” These days, she admits watching Gossip Girl to fill the void. “You can’t get those days back,” she says.

She doesn’t regret much else, even the weird lawsuit that she filed against her sister Natasha last fall, when Natasha claimed that she was the actual author of Hedge Fund Wives. “It’s over now,” Boncompagni says, and that’s pretty much all she’s willing to say, adding, “I would like this interview to be about the work.”

At the risk of starting off with a silly question, how can a pope have descendents?

Well, back then—this is what I’ve been told by my family—back then it wasn’t quite as strict. He had a family, and his wife passed away and then he became a pope. I don’t know.

The new book seems to be about building identity. But why are all your characters trying so hard to be a part of a social group that wants nothing to do with them? Are there any cool rich people?

There are definitely lots of cool rich people, but they’re not quite as much fun to write about, I guess. I love a good villain.

In both of your books, the largest moral threat to your lead female characters is their sense of entitlement.

I actually have a lot of people in my life who are held back by their sense of entitlement—people who have a lot of potential but aren’t willing to work as hard as they need to in order to achieve their goals.

It’s almost juvenile—how they collect all these shiny things.

Right. I know Hedge Fund is about the upper 1 percent and how wealthy a certain class of people are. But I think it’s universal and that people can relate to it. Most people—not people who are impoverished on the street, but the middle class, the upper class, the upper-middle class . . . we all live such pampered lives. Spoiling our children, spoiling ourselves, mortgaging our houses to the hilt so we can afford everything we want. People don’t live responsibly, and I don’t think anyone knows the meaning of sacrifice anymore.

But there’s a tone to your book that makes it difficult to tell if you’re satirizing or celebrating the ultra-entitled and ultra-rich. You use brand names as almost a literary device.

I’d say I’m hoping to achieve both. And I think you can. About the brands specifically, there was an article in The New York Times about how brands had become this overwhelming part of so many books and literature in general. Bret Easton Ellis was the original—I read Glamorama in college.

But Bret Easton Ellis’s characters find no redemption.

Well, he took something that he was witnessing in New York and did an amazing job demonstrating how corruptive materialism can be. He was one of the first who really did it well. But this is what I have to say about the whole brand thing—it is a device. By naming the stores she’s shopping in or the shoes she’s buying, it shows that this is a woman who is bitten as much by the materialism bug as most of my friends and women across the country are—and that this is a problem. Maybe I’m more subversive than Bret Easton Ellis in a way, because I’m glorifying it to an extent, but if you really cut away to the heart of what my books are about, I am very critical of it.

Are you offended that your books are classified as “chick lit”?

No, it doesn’t offend me, because I’ve read a lot of very well-written, profound chick-lit books. I won’t say my books aren’t fluffy or entertaining, because when I started writing Gilding Lily, that’s exactly what I wanted to accomplish. I’d just had my first son, and at the end of the day all I wanted to do was tuck into a fun read that was well written and maybe had a message to impart as well.

So what reprehensible feminine social network are you going to take out next? You could do soccer moms, or pro athletes’ wives . . .

I’m not ready to divulge what my next book is about! I head into a new world with the next one as well, but I’m still sort of obsessed with the lives of the affluent, and how affluence changes behavior and motivates people. But I’m having a lot of fun with this next one. It’s a lot darker.

In Gilding, Lily’s mother-in-law refers to Donald Trump as “a very private person.” There seems to be this perverse dual impulse in society to both court publicity and profess a distaste for it.

I agree. For me, it reminds me of that saying about “people wanting to have their cake and eat it too.” They actually don’t mind media, but they only want media they can control. It’s really funny.

Aren’t the newspapers and magazines that run society pages owned by the very rich people they cover? They run them like their own hyper-exclusive Facebook network.

A lot of these society magazines and society reporters live and work amongst each other. They’re each other’s neighbors and friends. But there’s this whole aspect of saying “I’m a very private person” out of one side of your mouth and the other side is sending out press releases about their own philanthropic endeavors. It’s annoying.

In a recent interview, you referred to your husband as “a very private person.”

I wasn’t being facetious! I was being honest. This is not a guy who is at all thrilled about seeing his picture anywhere. Which is one of the many things I love most about him. I can’t believe he’s still married to me. I really have put him through a lot. He really must love me.

And I have to ask, are you talking to your sister right now?

I’d rather not say anything that is going to hurt anybody involved in this whole horrible mess.

How did things get so crazy?

The one thing I have to say is that people who come up to me, like you, and ask, “Oh my goodness, how did something so crazy happen?”—they probably come from the kinds of homes where something like what happened with me and my sister was unimaginable. But then there are other people who tell me, “I know. I understand.”

Oh come on. I have crazy siblings too. One of them is probably going to take credit for this interview.

You either get it or you don’t. All I can say is that when my children grow up and they hear about this, we’ll be so functional a family it will be out of their realm of understanding and they’ll ask, “How could something like this happen?”