“Maybe something’s wrong with me,” the novelist Adriana Trigiani said on a sweltering morning earlier this summer at her home in Greenwich Village, “but I think books are show business. Storytelling is the bedrock of everything. A book has to be exciting.”

After her long and varied experience as a playwright, screenwriter, TV producer, film director and author of 19 novels, she thinks it’s “insanity” to believe that any creative industry will stay the same over time. So when she began thinking about how she would promote her latest best-selling novel, “The View From Lake Como,” a characteristically bighearted tale about a divorced Italian American woman who travels from New Jersey to Italy on a quest of self-discovery, “I went to my publisher, and I said: ‘Look, we gotta pump up the whole situation here. Have you been to a book signing? They’re boring! Stale!’ ”

Trigiani is not boring or stale. She greeted me and a photographer at her front door – at 9 in the morning – wearing a tuxedo, with a big red rose where a bow tie might be.

She ended up crafting a “Lake Como Show” for the tour, complete with a band. She has been told many times over the years that she should add “stand-up comic” to her long list of roles. “Well, I’m not a stand-up,” she said. “I don’t want to be a stand-up, because I don’t want to be out late at night.”

Trigiani estimates that there are about 4,000 books in her home. (“I have a cookbook collection upstairs that’s insane, but we’re not gonna go there.”)

She had arranged several books on a table in her living room that she wanted to make sure to discuss, the first of which was “They Had Faces Then,” an illustrated encyclopedia of Hollywood stars from the 1930s. (Trigiani’s love of old Hollywood is frequently apparent. Her novel “All the Stars in the Heavens,” from 2015, was inspired by the life of actress Loretta Young. When she lists some of the most prized signatures in her library’s books, she starts with Milton Berle, Ginger Rogers and David Niven.)

We looked at some of the high-wattage stars throughout the encyclopedia, appreciating their glamour.

“I know every C-lister, too,” Trigiani said, scanning the pages. “Nancy Kelly, nobody talks about her anymore, but she’s in here. I don’t know who these authors are, but if there’s a fire, I grab this to go, because this is my life.”

Edna Ferber and Anita Loos are now remembered best for Hollywood reasons, having written novels that were made into classic movies (“Giant,” by Ferber, and “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” by Loos). Trigiani loves both authors for the breadth of their literary efforts and has copies of seemingly every book they wrote. “This is one of the great books about Hollywood,” she said, pointing to a copy of “Kiss Hollywood Good-by,” a memoir by Loos. “I’m obsessed, really, with all of her work, but: women in Hollywood. ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’ helped me understand everything. When she went to Hollywood, she was 41 years old. She had to hide her age. I have everything she wrote.”

Noticing another book nearby, she let out a burst of enthusiasm: “Oh my God, get ready!” She had found her copy of “Twice Over Lightly: New York Then and Now” (1972), a book co-written by Loos and her friend Helen Hayes, the famed theater actress. Trigiani’s copy is signed by both of them.

Trigiani’s library is peppered with mini collections, sets of aesthetically pleasing books that spark curiosity about their contents, like the row of several midcentury volumes titled “Best in Children’s Books” – small compendiums, winningly designed, with samples of a given year’s most notable illustrated books for young readers. (Trigiani has one daughter, who is now in her 20s.) “Doubleday published those, and I have them all,” Trigiani said. “It took me forever to collect them. Look at the artfulness of these books! I still read them. Look at this. What did I pay for this? Four dollars. I got ripped off. I’m kidding …”

Among the children’s books, there was one especially prized possession: “The Elves and the Shoemaker,” an adaptation of a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, written and illustrated by Hilda Miloche. In it, an exhausted shoemaker goes to bed with his work unfinished, only to find it done to perfection in the morning.

“You’ll notice something here,” Trigiani said, pointing to a spread of pages in Miloche’s book and then around the room. “The colors are the colors you see in this room, basically. I have a theory that whatever you read and loved most as a kid, that’s your color palette.” Tucked inside the book is a picture of Trigiani’s paternal grandfather. She said that the book reminds her of him and a factory he owned, and that the story of the elves is “essential” to her understanding of the subconscious. “You go to sleep; your subconscious does all the cooking, all the writing, all the creating, everything.”

Trigiani said that when she is writing a novel, she avoids reading fiction. But it’s clear that the nonfiction she reads is in constant conversation with her work. “I went on a bender about Orson Welles that I can’t even tell you,” she said, reading “what anybody wrote about him. He was a big part of my novel ‘The Good Left Undone,’ and I cut all of it, like 300 pages. Because I said, ‘It’s a separate thing, it’s not the same thing.’ And my editor agreed.”

“Let me just tell you how my life works, and how my mind works,” she said, right before describing another “bender,” this one involving works by and about Ludwig Bemelmans, the writer and illustrator best known for the “Madeline” series for children. Trigiani read about how the actress Elsie de Wolfe once said to Bemelmans: “Italians are fortunate. They can always cry it away or sing it away or love it away.” She was already into the writing of “Lake Como,” and she plucked that line as the book’s epigram; the triumvirate it describes became the structure of the novel, the first part titled “Cry it away” and so on.

By the time you’ve spent an hour in Trigiani’s company, somehow it isn’t strange when she suddenly says:

“I was in a movie with Meat Loaf. I played a cockroach.”

In the movie, “Dead Ringer,” Meat Loaf played himself. “The director said to me, ‘I want you to act like a cockroach.’ And I thought (in a mock-refined tone), ‘I’m not going to act like a bug in my feature film debut.’ So the other girls are on a settee, doing like this. (She mimics cockroach squalor.) And I’m standing like this. (She leans elegantly against the wall.) Like I’m not in a giant brown garbage bag. It’s my delusion. That’s how much I love the movies!”

And yet all of this leaves out many other anecdotes and observations from Trigiani during a visit of 90 minutes or so. A small sampling: The autographed photo, given to her by a nun, of Clark Gable’s son. An analysis of the classic children’s book “Heidi” that I imagine is the first of its kind. (“It’s the most constipating diet in the world in this book.”) Her idea of heaven. (“To me the afterlife is hanging out with David Niven.”)

Toward the end of our time together, Trigiani pulled down a volume from the children’s encyclopedia “The Book of Knowledge.” She opened it and began reading sub-headings that were a dizzying combination of comprehensive and random: “How deep is the sea?” “Why must a baby learn to walk?” “What do we mean by the trade winds?” “The works of William Shakespeare.” “Coal and what it can do.” “The story of the circus.”

And then, almost as proof that when Trigiani is around, life has an entertaining script, we saw an entry for the Grimms’ fairy tale about the shoemaker and his elves.

“It’s all about the subconscious,” she said. “The elves don’t frolic in. The elves are in you!”