Barbara Sapienza is the author of the new novel The Laundress. She also has written the
novel Anchor Out. A retired clinical psychologist, she lives in Sausalito,
California.
Q:
How did you come up with the idea for The Laundress, and your character Lavinia
Lavinia?
A:
Lost and unmoored Lavinia Lavinia came to me asking me to listen to her story.
She wanted to be on my page. Her habits were clear: a gum chewer who wears a tuxedo jacket; a
student-teacher who drinks too much espresso; a dancer who has a best friend
named Kinky Mantoya with a curandera as a mother.
I
adopted and christened this 26-year-old as Lavinia Lavinia, first and last the
same, like my Italian-American friend whose first and last name were the same
until she married.
Because
I love to do laundry, to hang the sheets and clothes on the line, and to iron I
started with that and then moved into the darker cave of the story, which I
didn’t yet know or knew only in my subconscious.
My
mother loved laundry tasks and her mother too. I was following down the line.
Women for centuries have stood by the rivers and streams, and then the
lavanderies, washing pools, gathering together in community to wash clothes, to
chat and gossip as their children played and splashed in the water. Some women
washed on their knees in repentance.
Lavinia
Lavinia would be one of those children who would stand up to recover her story.
To
find herself Lavinia Lavinia turns to doing laundry in other people’s homes.
Laundry is a sacred ritual for her, which refreshes and restores what is
soiled. This cleansing ritual feeds her so she can remember and ask in a louder
voice “Who Am I?”
Q:
The novel is set in San Francisco--how important is setting to you in your
writing?
A:
Lavinia is shaped by San Francisco, whose traditional neighborhoods are almost
characters in the novel, Italian North Beach and the Hispanic Mission District.
As
a child, she was brought to San Francisco from Naples and grew up in North
Beach with her aunt and uncle. As a young adult she has moved to the Mission,
but revisits North Beach for her work as a laundress. The pastry shops and
espresso bars she frequents there take her back to her Italian roots and summon
almost forgotten memories of her mother
Living
in the Mission District, she comes in contact with a curandera, Mercedes Montoya,
an immigrant from Mexico and mother of her best friend Kinky. Mercedes mothers
Lavinia, feeds her, and teaches her about finding la querencia, her safe place
to stand.
A
writer friend wrote an endorsement:
I
enjoyed the company of tequila-drinking, bubblegum-chewing, dancing Lavinia,
the laundress, who took me on a no-tech tour of San Francisco, getting her
hands into clients’ dirty laundry and cleansing family secrets, including her
own. Sapienza elicits sympathy for her Italian immigrant heroine who
has more ups and downs than San Francisco has hills, but whose travails and
travels left me happy and hungry for Mexican food and espresso.
-Ann
Ludwig, freelance travel writer, The New York Times
Q:
What do you think the novel says about secrecy?
A:
Lavinia’s mother’s death was never explained to her and the history holds her
back. She’s afraid to ask and, fearing she might somehow be responsible,
protects relatives from revealing the truth. Secrecy is the ghost that lives in
Lavinia’s house as a shadow figure following her.
As
a psychologist I’m interested in how family secrets, especially related to
traumas, affect everyone involved. Well-intentioned adults can preserve a
secret that becomes a barrier among all of them. Lavinia’s quest to find the
truth drives the novel and dramatizes the consequences of secrecy.
Q:
Did you know how the book would end before you started writing it or did you
make changes along the way?
A:
No, I didn’t know how the novel would end when I began writing. I relied on the
characters to take me along on their journey.
The
surprise came to me at the end of the story as a gift. In this novel I discovered I was writing about
my grandmother who also came to the United States from Italy as a 4-year-old.
Her father then disappeared.
Catherina,
my nonna, didn’t chew gum, wear a tuxedo jacket with thin lapels, or dance but
she made a mean pizza, rolled pasta on a metal rod, rubbed my back in the tub,
and told me stories about my proud grandfather, who like Lavinia’s grandfather
was a jealous and a prideful man.
Once
when traveling on a bus and a man stared at my grandmother, my grandfather followed
the man off the bus and punched him in the nose.
Q:
What are you working on now?
A
memoir, Lagrimas Dulce or Sweet Tears, and a fairytale novel, The Dream Being.
The
protagonist, Elena, lives in an attic room of Russian Church of Our Lady in San
Francisco with a priest who has raised her after finding her as an infant.
Like
Vaselisa in the fairy tale, Elena has been given at a doll who lives inside her
pocket and perhaps her heart and guides her through childhood into her initiation
with Baba Vera, the good, but harsh, witch. Frank, a San Francisco taxi driver
inadvertently brings the bad witch to Elena’s house and then tries to save
Elena.
This
is a story about female intuition based on Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ analysis of
the Russian fairytale in Women Who Run with Wolves.
Estes
poses the doll to be a woman’s intuition, which is available to us but must be
fed. This makes sense to me. Intuition, a beyond knowing, is available to us,
especially women. However, in our culture we have a cultural bias against intuition.
As
with Frances Pia (Anchor Out 2017) and Lavinia Lavinia (The Laundress, 2020),
Elena in The Dream Being allows feminine intuition to guide her toward her
destiny in the form of the choices she makes. Though these women don’t know
their destination, they move on the path toward their inner home.
Sweet
Tears, a memoir in progress, is written in short segments as a reflection on
those mysterious and magical figures in my early life; the Italian and Sicilian
immigrants, their ancestors and progeny, who seem to lead the show, except when
I can reflect and make a different choice. Sweet tears and yelling punctuate
the stories.
This
quote by Hafiz speaks to my motivation in writing these memoirs:
“Don't
surrender your loneliness so quickly. Let it cut you more deep. Let
it ferment and season you as few humans and even divine ingredients can. Something
missing in my heart tonight has made my eyes so soft, my voice so tender, my
need for God absolutely clear.”
Q:
Anything else we should know?
A:
When my book was going to press, I realized I had written about my grandmother
Catherine who came from Sicily as a 4-year old.
She
too had been abandoned, not by her mother, but by her father, who soon after
their arrival by sea, returned to Sicily to start another family. She never
heard from him again.
She
too grew up in the Italian section. Boston and not San Francisco.
She
too might have felt responsible for his leaving. Maybe she cried too much on
the passage over.
She
too didn’t really know what happened. He disappeared.
Then
more than 120 years after her birth, she resurfaced in my unconscious mind to
be seen through Lavinia.
My favorite authors: Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Kent Haruf. Chris Cander,
The Weight of a Piano and Whisper Hollow.
Vanessa
Diffendorf, The Language of Flowers. Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing. Ocean
Vuong, On the Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous. Leonard Cohen, The Book of Longing.
Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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