This week’s other featured books, “Raging Fire of Love,” by Kelly James Clark and “Night of the Hawk,” by Lauren Martin, can be found by scrolling down below this post, or by clicking the author’s name on our Authors page.
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THE BOOK: After Italy: A Family Memoir of Arranged Marriage
PUBLISHED IN: 2024
THE AUTHOR: Anna Monardo.
THE EDITOR: Nicholas Grosso, managing editor, Bordighera Press.
THE PUBLISHER: Bordighera Press is affiliated with City University of New York’s Calandra Italian American Institute. Bordighera specializes in literature and scholarship of the Italian diaspora.
SUMMARY: After Italy: A Family Memoir of Arranged Marriage is an American immigration story. My parents’ and grandparents’ arranged marriages were brokered in Southern Italy to facilitate their immigration to the U.S. Ours was a happy family with patches of darkness, and in this book, I enlist Calabrian folklore, epigenetics, and psychology to help me uncover the source of our darkness.
My research dug far back into our history, relying on Italian and American family documents, to chart my father’s WWII experience as a medical student in Naples; my grandfather’s work in a Pittsburgh steel mill; and my family’s marriages—including her own—that seemed to be tainted by an Old World curse.
Our story eventually unfolds in an unlikely path to international adoption.
THE BACK STORY: I always knew I would write this story. In fact, my first novel, The Courtyard of Dreams (Doubleday 1994), is a fictionalized version of my family’s immigration story. My second novel, Falling In Love with Natassia (Doubleday 2006), is about a dancer and her teenage daughter, and that story took me far from my family. But, after Natassia, when I sat to begin a new project, my family’s story was waiting for me, challenging me to tell the truth about the parts of our story that I’d fictionalized in The Courtyard of Dreams. With research and writing, the book took about 15 years to complete.
WHY THIS TITLE?: The title came to me long ago. After Italy worked as a kind of net to gather together the trajectories of various family members who emigrated from Italy. I took a long time to arrive at the subtitle—A Family Memoir of Arranged Marriage. Finally, I realized that subtitle simply needed to announce what the story was about.
WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT TO READ IT? Readers so far are those interested in family stories, family stories set in Italy, family stories with psychological layers to them. This story examines the far-reaching damage of patriarchal power—on both women and men.
Often, readers have told me their family stories, which I feel privileged to listen to. A portion of the book deals with my journal to become a mother, which includes miscarriage, infertility, and, ultimately, the joyous adoption of my son.
BLURBS:
This beautifully written story of three generations of marriage is a page-turner. Monardo’s honest and reflective memoir reveals intergenerational patterns as intricate as Italian lace. This family story has something to teach us all. —Mary Pipher, A Life in Light and Reviving Ophelia
Anna Monardo’s story is both silk and steel, a garment of beauty and also of protection. Her family story is one of strength and vulnerability, the two chambers of the immigrant heart. Her Italian roots were fed and watered by women who served their husbands and sons and taught their daughters to do the same. If this seems old fashioned, look around. We’re still at it. —Adriana Trigiani, The Good Left Undone
In After Italy, Monardo crafts a moving, compelling, and gorgeously written memoir that is part cultural exploration and part emotional inventory. After Italy is a kind of translation, taking big questions involving society and self and relating them in the universal language of deeply explored personal experience. —Sue William Silverman, Acetylene Torch Songs and How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences
“To be a woman in an Italia in family,” Anna Monardo writes, “is to live in a courtyard, an enclosed world –it is safety, confinement, beauty, deprivation, fulfillment, wretched, wonderful, inescapable.” Her remarkable memoir, After Italy, seeks to end that harmful legacy. Hers is a quest to unravel a lineage of broken hearts so she might mend her own. Weaving research with dream with fine embroidered language, Monardo confronts the damage of Old World “patriarchal imperatives” upon three generations of vibrant Calabrian women, including arranged marriage, and the false narratives within the American Dream. After Italy is a story of desire, disappointment, perseverance and liberation, a reminder that love follows its own path, and may arrive unbidden on the salt ocean air, or the smile on an adopted boy’s face. Poignant. Brave. Inspiring. Brava! —Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, Finding Querencia: Essays from In Between
AUTHOR PROFILE: I began my first novel, The Courtyard of Dreams (Doubleday 1994), as my beloved grandmother was dying at age 66. She’d married in Italy at 14 ½, when a townsman asked for her, and her mother advised, “Marry him. He’ll take you to America.” Nothing had been easy in Gramma’s life, and then she died young. I felt urgency to capture her history. Writing was a way to stay close to her. Also, one immigrant woman’s story could, I believe, reveal much about the universal quandary: What is gained in immigration, what is lost?
After ten years writing one novel, I never intended to write another. But then, on my yellow legal pad, Mary, arrived. She is a world-class modern dancer at the end of her performance career at the same time that her teenage daughter is in crisis. My fictional character Mary offered me the opportunity to sink deeply into dance research (so fun!) and at the same time explore the ins and outs of maintaining a professional career in the arts while also raising a child. Was that even possible? By now, I was in my 30s and very much wanted a child, and I wanted to keep writing, but how to do both? Toward the end of the ten years spent writing my second novel, Falling In Love with Natassia (Doubleday 2006), I did become a single mother by choice. The novel had helped me work through my apprehensions and fears.
After Natassia, when I sat to work on a series of novellas, my imagination insisted it was time for memoir. I recently found a journal entry from 2008 in which I wrote, “Our true family story is the book I’ve been afraid of all my life.” When I found that note, I knew it was time to dig in again. By then I had found a trove of my father’s Italian documents—his academic, military, and professional papers—and that started my research. My mother left me a diary she had kept in the early years of their marriage. Reading that diary was the next part of my research.
AUTHOR COMMENTS:
My author comments are woven into my author profile, above.
SAMPLE: You can cut and paste on the template or refer readers to your Amazon page.
An excerpt from the Prologue:
Prologue
The Dress
Whether tomorrow she would love him, or he her, as much as this, or more, or less, no one could say.
—The Evening of the Holiday,
by Shirley Hazzard
I’ve always known it’s bad luck to try on a wedding dress before you’re engaged, just as it’s unlucky to receive a gift of gladiolus, the funeral flower. These lessons were taught to me by my Calabrian kin. Like the ancients, we use our superstitions and supplications to placate the gods, who have us in their teeth when it comes to the two most bewildering aspects of life: death and marriage.
But there was a Wednesday afternoon in 1990, in my New York apartment, when I stood up from my desk, walked away from the manuscript I was copyediting, and reached into my closet, confident it was now safe for me to lift the blue dry-cleaner bag over my mother’s wedding dress. Two nights earlier, sitting on my tall kitchen stool as I made coffee (or was I pouring wine?), my boyfriend of three years—I’ll call him Sam—had wrapped his big hands around my waist and said, “Let’s get married.”
The gown was a graying waterfall of lace and silk that Gramma Stella had sewn for my mother, Catherine, when she married her second cousin, a doctor a decade older than she was. I’d been shocked when I learned, as a kid, that my parents had had an arranged marriage. Growing up in suburban Pittsburgh and the first of our clan born in the U.S., I wanted to believe our family had blossomed from nothing less American than a love match. I didn’t like that Mom’s parents had picked out the guy, and then brought her back to Vazzano, our Southern Italian village, to meet him.
“If I didn’t like him,” my mother told me, “I wouldn’t have had to marry him. But I liked him right away.” And just as reassuring was their wedding album—as large as a coffee table and with the heft of Moses’s tablets. There was my mother holding her cascading bouquet, my father in white tie and his serious wire-framed eyeglasses. In the photos, their smiles were so lush, I felt sorry for any family that wasn’t us.
As I got older, though, I couldn’t help but notice my father’s pinched frown as he delivered his daily goodbye kiss somewhere in the vicinity of my mother’s face and her checked fury as she received not the actual kiss but its shadow. Rarely did I see them touch.
In time, I concluded that a marriage that looked good at the start might be the most dangerous match of all, giving no hint of when the joy would unravel, who would get hurt most, and how. My favorite let’s-play-house scenario was Let’s pretend we’re divorced. “We each have a baby,” I’d suggest to my playmates, “and we know how to drive.” None of the women in my family had a driver’s license, which, I concluded, was another source of unhappiness.
I did learn to drive, went to college, had jobs. And now was my chance to slip the lace wedding gown off the cloth-covered hanger. It was a struggle to pull the gown over my shoulders and down my middle. My mother had been an 18-year-old bride who weighed barely one hundred pounds, but I was a 35-year-old bride-to-be. Though smaller in stature than my mother, I was fleshier than a skin-and-bones teenager. Gently, I tugged. I’d been waiting for this moment since I was a kid.
“Come on, Mom, let me see it,” I had begged one day when I glimpsed the gown in the cedar closet she was organizing. “I won’t try it on, I just want to look.”
“If I pull that dress out,” my mother told me through gritted teeth, “I’m going to burn it.” I was saddened by her disappointment, which I assumed was the price of having agreed to an old-fashioned marriage. I vowed I’d know exactly what I was in for when it finally came time for me to get my hands on that dress.
Except here I was, and in the mirror, I saw clearly this wasn’t the wedding dress for me. Even with the zipper gaping open, I couldn’t exhale. The forty-year-old lace was close in color to my winter pallor. I did a half-turn and watched the long train swoosh out to the side, a sweet movement. “Okay,” I said out loud, “I got this out of my system.” In truth, it was a relief to disqualify that heirloom gown, infused as it was with my parents’ murky history.
If you’re really doing this, I told myself, make it new. You and Sam can be happy.
But as I lifted the skirt to pull the gown up over my head, it got stuck at my shoulders. If I tugged, the fabric would rip: sacrilege. If I pulled the skirt down again, I’d have to wear the dress for the rest of my life.
I’m a prisoner in my mother’s wedding dress.
I was fully aware of how, in the retelling, I could play up the comedy of this moment. Somebody, quick, call the fire department! But with my head swathed in faded lace and my arms stuck over my head like a person under arrest, I recognized the bad joke I was caught up in and I started to cry.
I heard the strained fabric rip a tiny bit as I worked my way free of Mom’s wedding dress until I stood there exposed—a 35-year-old woman unable to imagine for herself a marriage different from what she’d witnessed as a child. I had left home young, rebelled in a thousand ways, but I would never wipe out the bad news about marriage that was written onto my bones.
WHERE TO BUY IT: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.
PRICE: $22
CONTACT THE AUTHOR: I think it’s very important to open the door to writer/reader interaction. You could post your e-mail address, Facebook page, or Twitter handle, or all of the above.
Web site (where messages can be sent): annamonardo.com Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/anna.monardo
Email: annafrancescamonardo@gmail.com
Snowflakes in a Blizzard 