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Anna Monardo is the author of the new book After Italy: A Family Memoir of Arranged Marriage. Her other books include the novel Falling in Love with Natassia. She teaches in the Writer's Workshop of the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and she lives in Omaha, Nebraska.
Q: What inspired you to write After Italy?
A: In various ways I’ve been telling this story all my life. After Italy is the story of my family’s immigration to the U.S. from Southern Italy.
My first novel, The Courtyard of Dreams (Doubleday 1993), was a fictionalized version of our story. The focus of my second novel, Falling In Love with Natassia (Doubleday 2006) was far from my family—that novel is about a dancer and her teenage daughter—but when I tried to move on to a third novel, the family story kept showing up in my notes, in my free-writes. I felt compelled to write the parts of our family story that I either fictionalized or didn’t include in Courtyard.
Q: How did you research the book, and did you learn anything about your family that especially surprised you?
A: I learned so much about our family! Actually, the “research” sort of fell into my lap. After our father died, my brother and I cleaned out his desk and found a thick folder of all his Italian documents, beginning with his grade-school report cards! His medical-school exam booklet was there, military papers, his whole paper trail.
He was born in 1922, so his childhood and young adulthood were lived under fascism. His father was an outspoken anti-Fascist, but my father was conscripted into the Italian army and had no choice but to serve.
My research began by reading and translating those documents. Then I did a lot of reading about WWII and learned how truly devastated Southern Italy was after the war.
My father, after his father died, became head of family for his six siblings and mother. That was his motivation to immigrate to the U.S., hoping to establish his medical career and send help back to his family. An arranged marriage to an American woman would make it easier for him to immigrate.
That woman was my mother. She was 18, he was 28; it was 1948. Their mothers were second cousins. This was how things were done in that place, at that time.
Everyone was familiar with how arranged marriage worked—except for the bride, who had grown up in America. She thought it was a love match—and to some degree it was; they gaze at each other in the courtship photos!—but ultimately, she was hurt that her husband’s priority was the pledge he’d made to his family, which he was not able to turn away from.
Meanwhile, it was not easy for a young Italian doctor to get hired in the U.S. in 1950; it was too soon after the war. He worked in various hospitals in different parts of the U.S., and he and my mother were separated for five years. She kept a diary during that time, and she left the diary for me, so that became a large part of my research, too.
Eventually, they reconciled, but they were never able to heal the wounds of that separation. They were distant cousins, and yet this culture clash erupted between them.
Q: The writer Sue William Silverman said of the book, “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.” What do you think of that description?
A: I love that description. I’m grateful to Sue Silverman for seeing that in this narrative. From the start, I saw our family story as a microcosm within which I could explore the timeless, universal experience of migration. When people cross borders, change language, leave behind family, what is gained, what is lost?
These questions have been with me since I was a kid, and I hoped that, while digging deeply into my personal story, I’d also be exploring those larger questions. I’m not sure if I succeeded at that, but I do see the world differently after having written this book.
After I learned how much difficulty my parents survived in their respective lives and in their marriage, I was awed by their resilience. After everything, they still were able to give my brother and me so much love. In their way, they loved each other. I think that I previously had too narrow a vision of what love is.
Q: What impact did it have on you to write this memoir, and what do you hope readers take away from it?
A: I came away from this project thinking that, at various times in our lives, we’re all immigrants of a sort. Marriage is a kind of border crossing. So is having a child.
I recently retired from university teaching, and over the years I worked with many students who were the first in their family to go to college. That’s a huge border crossing, and again, as with my parents, I feel awe.
A lovely thing that has happened with After Italy is that readers often begin telling me their family story. It’s an honor to be trusted in that way.
There are some dark events in my family story, events I never learned about until I was in my 30s. It was hard to write those parts, but I think that many—if not most—families go through some dark patches.
Often, there’s more suffering from trying to tamp down that information than there would be if the difficulties were revealed and addressed. If my story leaves readers more comfortable thinking about or talking about their own family stories, that would be really good.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Two interconnected novellas set in the 1960s and early 1970s. I love that era.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Nothing I can think of. Thank you for these good questions and your interest in After Italy.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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