Writer Anna Monardo joins me to chat about her memoir, After Italy: A Family Memoir of Arranged Marriage.
Bio:
Anna Monardo grew up in Pittsburgh, with strong ties to her Calabrian family. Her forthcoming memoir, After Italy: A Family Memoir of Arranged Marriage (Bordighera Press; May 14, 2024), is the story of her family’s immigration to the U.S. Excerpts were published in the New York Times, Creative Nonfiction, Hotel Amerika, Cimarron Review, More, Exquisite Pandemic, Fourth Genre, and Ovunque Siamo.
After Italy is the factual retelling of the family story at the heart of her first novel, The Courtyard of Dreams (Doubleday). Set largely in southern Italy, Courtyard was translated into German, Norwegian, and Danish; featured in the Selected Shorts reading series at Symphony Space in New York City; and nominated for a PEN/Hemingway Award and recommended for the National Book Critics Circle Awards.
Excerpts from her second novel, Falling In Love with Natassia (Doubleday), first appeared in Prairie Schooner and were nominated for Pushcart Prizes. Her work has been anthologized in The Dream Book Anthology of Writing by Italian-American Women, Five Years of Fourth Genre, and A Different Plain: Contemporary Nebraska Fiction Writers. Monardo’s fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in The Sun, Birmingham Poetry Review, HuffPost, Indiana Review, Poets & Writers, and other magazines and journals.
A recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, the Djerassi Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, as well as three fellowships from the Nebraska Arts Council, she teaches in the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
Please tell us about your current release.
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 my own—that seemed to be tainted by an Old World curse. Our story eventually unfolds in an unlikely path to international adoption.
What inspired you to write this book?
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.
I recently found a journal entry from 2008; I wrote, “A memoir of my family’s 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. 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.
Excerpt from After Italy: A Family Memoir of Arranged Marriage:
This is an excerpt from the 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.
What exciting project are you working on next?
I have a set of inter-connected novellas begun years ago and put aside while I worked on the memoir. The novellas are set in Pittsburgh, in the 1960s and 1970s, an era that is endlessly interesting to me.
When did you first consider yourself a writer?
I don’t think I thought, I’m a writer; I just wrote a lot. During math class in 5th and 6th grades, I slipped sheets of paper under my math book and wrote poems. I felt sure that if I got caught, my teacher would read my poetry and immediately understand that I was responding to a higher calling than math.
When I was around ten, I wanted to stay home alone while my parents went out on errands or whatever. I promised them that while they were gone, I would write. They were very smart and agreed to my proposal. I always had pages to show them when they got back.
After college, I moved to NYC and worked in publishing. Reading other people’s manuscripts got me fired up, and that’s when I asked myself, Are you going to try to write seriously or not?
Do you write full-time? If so, what’s your workday like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?
No, I don’t write full-time. This spring I’m retiring from full-time teaching in the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where I’ve been since 1997. Before full-time teaching, I was a copy-editor at Time Magazine for 10 years, while also doing part-time teaching. In the early years, I stayed up late to write. After I became a mother, I got up early to write. With teaching, summers and holidays offer chunks of time for writing.
What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
I’ve read that at the end of each of his work days, Hemingway stopped mid-sentence, to make it easier to start writing the next day. I borrowed that. At the end of each writing session, I stop in the middle of a scene or a paragraph. I add big arrows and a Sticky Note: Start here, Start here!
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
A dancer, an actress. Some activity that would plant me solidly in “make-believe.”
Anything additional you want to share with the readers?
It took me 15 years to complete After Italy, so now it’s a thrill to have the opportunity to talk with readers about it. What’s been really beautiful is how often readers tell me their family stories. I love how easily stories can create connection.
I love the question of when you first considered yourself a writer. I think it is a metamorphosis process for most of us.