By Lindsey Pizzica Rotolo

“It’s like living on a campus,” novelist Courtney Maum says of her new house on the village green. “With the church bells ringing… and being able to walk to the library… it’s pretty great.”

The library, and the hidden wet bar in their new home, actually were the greatest selling points for Maum and her husband, French filmmaker Diego Ongaro. They were also thrilled by the prospect of a good quality day care center for their toddler. Leaving Sandisfield, Mass. behind in January, where they had to drive 30 minutes to anything, Maum enjoys spending less time in the car and the “really supportive community” they have found here.

In addition to writing, Maum has worn a lot of hats professionally since graduating from Brown University in 2001. She started out as a party promoter for Corona Extra in Paris, and then moved to Brooklyn where she worked as a freelance copywriter (beauty was her niche) for a couple years before moving to the Berkshires in 2007. Once there, she briefly worked at the Sandisfield Store before becoming the creative brand strategist for Iredale Mineral Cosmetics in Great Barrington. In 2010, she branched out on her own in the corporate naming field, and continues to work with several branding agencies in this discipline today. Lately, she’s been writing advice columns for fellow writers in publications such as Tin House and Buzzfeed. Maum also writes faux celebrity book reviews for the literary magazine Electric Literature.

Her first novel, “I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You,” was published by Simon & Schuster in 2014. Described as “the kind of funny that is mean and dirty, with some good bad words thrown in” by The New York Times, the novel takes place in Paris during the lead-up to the second Gulf War. The protagonist, an Englishman named Richard Haddon, goes through the motions in a marriage gone stale with his French wife, the lovely Anne-Laure de Bourigeaud. Haddon has an affair with an American woman, who ultimately breaks up with him, leaving him to sort through the debris.

Courtney Maum at her home in Norfolk.

Maum’s observations on marriage, its potential for tedium offset by the sanctuary it provides, are brilliant, especially considering that the first draft was written when the author was just 25 years old. The novel was rejected initially, but Maum made successive revisions, gradually showing the protagonist in a more compassionate light. The book was ultimately picked up by Touchstone, a small division of Simon and Schuster. “I was very fortunate to have such great support at Touchstone, and my agent is a pit bull—that helped a lot, too,” she says.

Maum’s second novel, due out next spring, dives into the effect of technology on our interpersonal relationships. Set in New York City, and written in a female voice this time, the novel is another story of betrayal, but this unfaithfulness is more philosophical in nature than the infidelity in her first book. Maum is disturbed by the “evolutionary erasure of instincts through our over-emphasis on technology.” The new novel is an exploration of that trend.

This past summer was the first time the author was able to focus solely on creative writing, but that didn’t sit as well as she thought it would. “I’m a better thinker and writer the more I have going on,” she says. It has also been a struggle for her to write a book in a female voice. “There’s just too much of me in the story when I write as a woman. I’ll never do it again!”

A Fodor’s review of “I Am Having so Much Fun Here Without You” describes Maum’s voice as having “cutting wit and deep emotion.” If her next novel is as heartfelt and funny while covering a dark topic, fans will likely be screaming for more.

Photos by Bruce Frisch.