Long before Augusten Burroughs was running with scissors, a big-hearted Southern whirlwind of a writer named Pat Conroy served as America’s unofficial poster boy for family dysfunction.

The eldest of seven siblings raised under the violent iron fist of a cele­brated Marine Corps fighter pilot, Conroy sought refuge and revenge by channeling his nightmarish upbringing and its aftereffects into such gut-wrenching, cinema-ready novels as The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline and The Prince of Tides. The success of his prose on page and screen didn’t prevent the real-life marriage meltdowns and numerous personal breakdowns that come with having the devil himself as your muse.

More than a decade in the writing, his new memoir The Death of Santini marks Conroy’s coming to terms with his “Chicago Irish” father, Don (nicknamed the Great Santini, after the trapeze artist, for his aerial prowess); his indefatigable Southern belle mother, Peg; his unsinkable grandmother, Stanny; sister Carol, the prickly family poet; and brother Tom, whose suicide plunge at 34 from a 14-story building came to manifest the malignant memories that haunt his siblings.

Conroy was inspired to undertake his memoir in 1998 after writing the eulogy for his father, which he uses to close this book, both literally and figuratively.

“I needed some kind of summing-up, a wrap-up for the direction that my career has taken me,” Conroy says. “I’ve been so family-obsessed that I wanted to try to figure out what it all means and come to some conclusions.”

Despite the book’s dark subject matter, readers may be surprised to find The Death of Santini uplifting, and at times downright funny, as the author casts off punch lines and personal demons with every page. Conroy approves but takes no credit for this reader-friendly chiaroscuro.

"I've been so family-obsessed that I wanted to try to figure out what it all means."

“When you say it goes from light to darkness, that sounds like it should be, but I’m never very good at that,” he admits. “I had good editing, good people reading the book from the very beginning and arranging it.”

One of those clever souls was Conroy’s wife, the novelist Cassandra King (Moonrise), who helped steel the author through his father’s final days. The couple married a week after Don Conroy’s death.

“My father adored her,” Conroy says. “Dad used to say, ‘What does Sandra see in you, son?’ And now, poor Cassandra has been marinated in the Conroy family madness.”

Fiction provided a means for Conroy to process the constant belittling, badgering and physical and mental abuse the family suffered at the hands of his larger-and-scarier-than-life father. But when the budding author dared to expose the family secrets in the guise of the Bull Meecham brood in his 1976 debut novel, The Great Santini, the family was horrified.

“One of the things my brothers and sisters have had to ask ourselves is, did this all happen? What was the result of it happening to us? How do we relate it to our children or our wives or husbands?” Conroy says. “We’re all screwed up, coming through Mom and Dad. That was a difficult country to travel in, but we traveled it, we made it through, and somehow we survived it.”

That fragile illusion would be destroyed years later when Tom, who’d had a minor role in the film version of The Great Santini, ended his life in Columbia, South Carolina.

“But Tom did not survive it,” Conroy continues, choking up. “Tom can bring us to our knees. We all feel we failed him, left him behind. We were not watchful or vigilant enough with Tom to help him survive.”

Conroy’s mother, who tirelessly encouraged him to pursue a writing career, was in her glory when the film premiered in her hometown of Beaufort, South Carolina, where it was filmed. She would later submit the novel into evidence in her divorce from Don.

As for Don, the best-selling novel and the film that followed sparked a love affair that knew no bounds.

“With my father, it wasn’t a flirtation with Hollywood, it was a marriage,” Conroy recalls. “When he finally realized that I had killed him in the movie, he was furious for a couple of weeks. I couldn’t figure out why until he said, ‘You f__ked up the sequel!’ He did take that role utterly seriously. There were license plates of the Great Santini, hats of the Great Santini. Going to Dad’s apartment was like going to the county fair, only the county fair was based entirely on him and all the rides were Santini rides and all the clowns were Santini clowns. He could not get enough of it.”

The family uproar over The Great Santini and his subsequent novels continues to this day. When his siblings got wind that big brother had a memoir in the works, Conroy couldn’t help having a little fun at their expense.

“They always said, ‘You won’t be able to write this, Pat, because no one will believe it.’ My brothers and sisters are terrified of this book,” he says. “Of course, I was telling my brothers that I was giving them sex-change operations and my sisters that I was going to have them marry monsters and their children were going to be the devil’s spawn. But now that it’s coming out, I’m worried about their judgment.”

Having exorcised his demons, Conroy is working on a new novel and his first young adult book, neither of which involves family ghosts.

“I’m going to try to leave the family in peace,” he vows. “There are other things to write about. Of course, I’m ashamed that I didn’t think of this until I was 90 years old!” (Conroy is slightly inflating his age: He turns 68 just before his memoir’s October 29 publication.)

But his dark journey did lead him to a surprising conclusion about the family that fueled much of his career.

“Being born into this family was the greatest thing that ever happened to me,” he says. “It just took me a long time to realize it and 40 years to write about it.”

Though he’s a highly regarded journalist, Scott Stossel has long endured an affliction that was hidden from many of his closest associates: near-crippling anxiety. In My Age of Anxiety, a narrative that’s both deeply personal and wide-ranging, he examines the history and treatment of this common disorder.

It took much courage for you to write this personal account of your inner life: What do you hope your book will accomplish?

I hope this book will provide readers with a deeper understanding of the condition, and of both the scientific and cultural contexts in which it exists. Especially for people struggling with anxiety, I hope the book can provide a modicum of solace—the recognition that they are not alone. I also hope people find it entertaining and possibly somewhat hopeful, despite my trawling through some dark places.

By all outside appearances, you’re the capable and confident editor of The Atlantic. Do you think many of your colleagues will be surprised to read about your struggles with anxiety?

Some of them already definitely have been. (As advance copies of the book circulate around the office, I’ve had a parade of colleagues in my office telling me they’d like to give me a hug. Which is nice and also a little uncomfortable.) And I suspect I will continue to be greeted with surprised reactions from professional acquaintances.

The book’s section on drugs is sure to be controversial. What are your thoughts about Big Pharma’s response?

I don’t yet have any sense of how Big Pharma will respond. But I’m definitely not anti-drug. (How could I be when I take medications myself!) In fact, I’d say I’m guardedly pro-pharma—drugs are the best or only solution for many people. I just think we need to be cognizant of the medical risks and societal risks. We should view drugs with both skepticism and hope.

You make many references to the caring and support of your spouse, Susanna. How are you able to maintain relationships with family and friends given your admittedly narcissistic focus on yourself and your condition?

In some ways, my inward focus on my anxiety makes me a worse husband/father/son/friend than I otherwise would be. Susanna has sometimes had to carry an unfairly heavy load. But I would like to think my anxiety has also enlarged my capacity for empathy and made me more conscientious and effective in some areas of my life (even as it has clearly made me less effective in others).

How would you describe the fiscal impact of anxiety—on families, workers and businesses, as well as the healthcare system?

By some measures the impact is huge. Missed days of work due to anxiety disorders (and depression) cost the U.S. economy upward of $50 billion annually. And anxiety is a leading cause of visits to doctors’ offices (which may actually help the economy, but is still not a good thing). Clinical anxiety can place a large fiscal burden on families—it can contribute to unemployment, alcoholism and drug addiction, as well as general distress.

You state that your lifelong struggle with anxiety might be a “source of strength” and a “bestower of certain blessings.” Can you explain how so?

Anxiety, when it’s not debilitating, can bring with it certain gifts: a heightened awareness of your environment; more sensitive social antennae; a general prudence about risk-taking; a spur toward achievement. The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard believed that the greater the anxiety, the greater the opportunity for growth. I think there’s definitely something to that—though when my anxiety is at its worst I’d trade away the opportunity for growth in exchange for the anxiety dissipating.

After writing three critically acclaimed novels, Gary Steyngart turned to memoir. Little Failure, published this month, is an unsparing, often funny, account of Steyngart’s anxiety-ridden life from his early childhood in Russia, through his family’s immigration to Queens, New York, and ending with the publication of his first novel. Our reading of the memoir raised some additional questions, which Shteyngart answered via email.

You've written three successful novels. Why a memoir now, earlyish in your career?
Earlyish? I'm 41. That's 76 in Russian years.

You dedicate Little Failure to your parents and to your analyst. Readers will discover why. What does your analyst have to say about you honoring him this way?
He seemed pretty happy, although he doesn't really say much of anything. It's old-fashioned Freudian-like therapy where I just blather on and he keeps mostly quiet.

You describe a father frustrated by his failure to achieve his dreams who was abusive to you. Does he still believe the adage you quote in the book that "Not to hit is not to love"?
I don't think so. Now it's all about love without hitting.

Ok it was a mistake. But your father took you to see the film Emmanuelle: The Joys of a Woman? How old were you?
Old enough to know I was watching the best film ever made, young enough not to know what to do about it.

Like many Russian Jews who left the Soviet Union, your father idolized Ronald Reagan. Early on you did too. You describe your then self as a "ten-year-old Republican." While your father is still a conservative, you are not. What happened?
Oberlin College, that's what happened. Plus a general softening towards people. On my part.

You write that from your mother you inherited, among other things, "fanatic attention to detail." What traits did you inherit from your father?
Dark humor, love of nature.

You were severely asthmatic as a child growing up in Leningrad. Soon after you arrived in NYC at age 7 your symptoms seem to have disappeared. What's the explanation for that?
I think the asthma went away when I hit puberty, which I believe happens to many children.

You didn't entirely lose your Russian accent until you were 14. How much of a conscious effort did you make to speak American English like a native?
I practiced in the mirror like crazy. When I got a TV, I got a Texan accent (“Dallas” was on).

"Soviet vacationing was a rough, exhausting business," you write of your childhood trips to the Crimea in the 1970s. Where do you travel for fun these days?
To the Crimea of America. It's called Miami Beach.

You graduated summa cum laude from Oberlin College—despite the recreational excesses that earned you the nickname Scary Gary. Who coined the phrase and what episode inspired the coinage?
I can't fully recall who coined it. I think at some drunken party someone said, "Oh, look, even Scary Gary is here." A nickname was born.

Really? You never, ever had writer's block?
Sorry. I have many other problems, though.

What's your favorite photograph in the book? Why?
Maybe the one on the cover. Most boys would grab the steering wheel of the toy car, but I was scared out of my mind. I knew what the insurance rates in Leningrad were like.

Little Failure essentially recounts your life until the publication of your first novel. But in passing, jumping ahead, you several times mention your wife. You're married? Do tell.
I am married! To a woman! She's very nice!

As a veteran editor of Harlequin romance novels, Patience Bloom has had the enviable job of facilitating fairy-tale love stories between heroric hunks and whip-smart heroines for 16 years. When it came to her own affairs of the heart, though, Bloom's dating life was far from picture-perfect. In her 40s and after many short-term relationships that ended in disappointment, she nearly gave up on love—until reconnecting with a high school acquaintance offered a shot at her very own happily-ever-after. Romance Is My Day Job is Bloom's charming, utterly relatable account of navigating the ups and downs of dating and finding love when and where you least expect it. We asked Bloom a few questions about the book. 

How did the idea for the book come about?
I started writing Romance Is My Day Job as a stress-reliever six weeks before my wedding. Two years went by, and an agent—who became my agent—convinced me to polish the book and try to sell it. Why not? Sam and I have an extraordinary story. A reclusive 40-something romance editor unexpectedly reunites with the wild class clown of her high school years. That’s a pretty good romance. 

What was the first romance novel that you ever read? How old were you and what did you think of it?
My first official romance novel was Phantom Marriage by Penny Jordan, followed immediately by Desire’s Captive. I didn’t realize there were books like this—just for me! I was 14 and reading romances when I should have been studying for exams. I remember Desire’s Captive more because the hero’s name was Nico, and after being such a grumpus through the entire book, he finally admits his love to the heroine. I gasped and then melted.

How did you become a romance book editor? Was it something you always wanted to do?  
I liked to read romance novels, but I read a lot of other books, too: nonfiction, thrillers, literary fiction and commercial women’s fiction. Publishing was my calling, and by some happy accident, my first job was at Harlequin. So I turned my guilty-pleasure reading into a full-time job.

What was the weirdest reaction a guy ever had when you first told him about your job?
The weirdest reaction came on a fourth date with a guy, who’d just told me he’d gotten back with his ex. I didn’t know why he wanted to keep seeing me until he handed me his unpublished book. He knew all along that I was an editor, and this was the only reason why he wanted to date me. Most guys were enlightened, asked a lot of questions and thought it sounded like a fun job.

Is there a romance hero archetype that you didn’t encounter in real life? Which archetype do you feel would be the worst kind of guy to date in real life, why?
I never dated the law enforcement guy, though I appreciated their rescuing my cats during an apartment fire, giving me directions, and reassuring me during some crises in the city. Dating a NYC cop would have been too scary for me since I worry too much, but I’d have made an exception for Elliott Stabler [from the TV show “Law & Order: SVU”]. In my experience, the worst guy to date is the alpha male. He’s just a jerk. Alphas are loveable in romance novels because you know that some goodness lies behind the intensity. In real life, the alphas I’ve encountered have been sadistic as boyfriends, but fun as just friends (as long as we do what he wants to do).

What’s your favorite genre of romance?
I like moody historical romances, romantic suspense and sexy, glitzy romances (I’m not sure that’s a genre). A nice, cozy small-town romance can also be deeply satisfying. Paranormal or Western-themed romances are not as much of a draw for me, but I have read some great ones.

How did your “uninspired” dating life affect how you felt about your job?
No matter how awful my date was, the romances I read the next day were mood-boosters. If love couldn’t happen to me, these heroines felt like my sisters, also in search of someone. I rooted for the characters to find love instead. It didn’t depress me to come to work after a lame night with Mr. Not Right at All.

Why do you think romance novels are so popular with readers?
These are happy stories about love. They leave the reader with hope of some kind, not necessarily that Mr. Perfect will land in their laps, but that love exists. Romance novels are fun decadence, fantasy and dream-food for romantics.

What was it about your husband that signaled to you that he was “the one”?
I knew he was “the one” when we first spoke on the phone—within a week of our connecting on Facebook. He has this reassuring voice, and I wanted to keep listening to him. Something clicked. This felt different, so we just kept talking on the phone. Because I had two feet on the ground, I also understood that he might not recognize me as “the one” for him. I was ready for anything—even nothing.

What’s next for you?
Promoting this book is next. While I do that, I’ve started writing Cassie McBride’s Dating Adventures: How to Love Like a Romance Heroine, with a little more dating memoir thrown in. I also am generating more romance writing tips on my blog (www.romanceismydayjob.com). If that weren’t enough, I’m writing a steamy office romance (might as well).

(Author photo by Patrick Smith)

When Carol Wall hired a neighbor’s gardener to improve her long-neglected yard, she never imagined that the Kenyan immigrant would transform her outlook on life as well. In Mister Owita’s Guide to Gardening, Wall reflects on what she learned from their special friendship.

What did you like best about Giles Owita?
Giles was always optimistic. He always had a smile on his face. He had a deep knowledge of all things horticultural. And I always admired and envied how he was able to fully immerse himself in the work that he loved. He always seemed to give everyone and everything his full attention. And he had a way of explaining complicated concepts with elegance and simplicity. He was a teacher at heart. He taught me to have faith.

You initially resisted some of his ideas for your lawn. How did he teach you to love flowers?
Oh, how I wish he were here to answer that question himself! When I first told Giles I didn’t want flowers, he somehow managed to answer me with an affirmative response. I now understand that since he was so stubborn, this was merely his way of acknowledging my request while at the same time not acting upon it at all. When the flowers appeared that spring, they led me to examine a lot of what I’d been keeping under layers of protective covering: my childhood, my parents, my family and my illness. This probably wasn’t Giles’ intention (though who knows, he was always smarter than all of us) but that’s what happened.

This was originally a book about breast cancer, but your son recommended that you refocus it to include your friendship with Mr. Owita. How did including the friendship change and enrich your manuscript?
I was really struggling with writing this as a memoir about surviving breast cancer. For some reason I couldn’t bring myself to write in the first person, believe it or not. Introducing Giles helped me focus the narrative. His character took some of the pressure off, strangely, and made me more comfortable with sharing my experience. It’s poetic in a way—our friendship helped me embrace and accept life, and his spirit has helped me explore and accept my true feelings.

You write that he was the best professor of your life. Yet that wasn’t what you expected when you first met him. Why not?
I expected that he might simply help to improve my shabby-looking yard. I thought of him as a hard-working gardener, but assumed that we had very different life experiences. Little did I know!

What were some of the things that drew you together?
On the face of it we were as different as two people could possibly be. But it turns out we had so much in common: the unexpected similarities in our life experiences, the need to adjust to a “plan B,” the importance of faith and family, the desire to learn and to teach.

This is a book about so much—gardening, life, illness, transitions. What were some of the major life changes that you and Mr. Owita walked through together?
We both had experienced events that involved loss, fear, guilt and shame. Our friendship allowed us to share and process our experiences without fear of judgment.

What do you hope readers will take away from this story?
Giles taught me so many things that changed my life. He embraced and accepted life’s afflictions, something that took me a while to come around to. (His cane in my study reminds me of that.) In the end, I guess it’s that sometimes the loveliest secrets and treasures appear where we least expect them.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of this book.

Barbara Ehrenreich and her younger sister are very close. But her sister really, really does not like the title of Ehrenreich’s new memoir, Living with a Wild God.

“She thinks I’m being too soft on theism in this book. She’s like, how can you write a book with God in the title! It was hardcore, the atheism we came from,” Ehrenreich says with a bemused laugh during a call to her home in Alexandria, Virginia, where she moved some years ago to be near her daughter and grandchildren.

Readers of Ehrenreich’s earlier books—Nickel and Dimed, Bait and Switch or Bright-Sided, for example—know her to be a smart, funny, opinionated progressive voice. Her fascinating new book—her most personally revealing work so far—almost inadvertently points to the sources of both her rigor and her passion.

Ehrenreich accepts a challenge from her younger self to explore the “uncanny” mystical experiences of her youth.

Ehrenreich, who has described herself as a fourth-generation atheist, was the child of parents raised in radicalized mining families of Butte, Montana. Her parents, we learn, eloped in their teens and eventually became successful and admired community members. “They were smart,” Ehrenreich says. “They were unusual in their upward mobility. They encouraged reading, inquiry, curiosity. But they had problems. My father had the drinking problem first. And my mother didn’t like me. This would make no sense in today’s child-raising discourse, because we now have these artisanal project children, where we constantly think about their feelings and challenges. My mother’s belief was do something useful or get out of the way. My parents imbued me with a firm, dogmatic atheism and rationalism.”

This is the crux of the story Ehrenreich explores in Living with a Wild God. Sometime around the age of 13, she began to have strange experiences of the ineffable. “In these episodes of disassociation as a teenager, I could not look at a chair and see a chair. I saw something else, unnamed, unaccounted for, something beyond language,” Ehrenreich says. At the same time, as a rationalist, she pondered the meaning of a life that ended in death in a cooly “solipsistic” manner.

For a decade or so, starting when she was 14, she kept an episodic—and remarkably articulate—journal of her thoughts and observations about this dilemma, which she called “The Situation.” Her seemingly mystical experiences culminated in a vividly described, ecstatic, hallucinatory morning in Lone Pine, California, after a ski trip with her brother and a friend.

For years, as she battled with her parents, went off to Reed College, earned a Ph.D. in cellular immunology from Rockefeller University, and then made a U-turn into social activism and a career as a writer, Ehrenreich explained these teenage episodes to herself as a kind of temporary insanity.

But about five years ago she decided to write “a massive, sweeping history of religion, the rise of monotheism, which I do not applaud.” Ultimately that big idea didn’t work, but Ehrenreich did have the journal of her younger self wrestling with big thoughts. And, it so happens, in that journal her younger self threw down a challenge in July 1958 to her future self, writing: “What have you learned since you wrote this?”

“I think there was a little bit of a secret polemic here,” Ehrenreich says of her interest in writing about the struggles of her younger self. “Which is that I think that there is a narrative trend, certainly in mainstream American fiction, of maturing, of growing beyond whatever you were in your youth and coming to a more reflective and socially responsible state. I find that kind of repellant. I have respect for the child and the teenage persons of myself. I undertook this with the feeling that I had to return to them, that I could learn from them, that their experiences were not something to be put away. Some of it is very embarrassing, which is to say I was pretty self-involved. But I see the logical rigor that got me there.”

In the intervening years, it turns out that Ehrenreich has learned quite a bit. Researching this book, which as it develops becomes a compelling mix of memoir and metaphysical rumination, she read widely in philosophy, science and the writing of mystics and others who seemed to have had experiences similar to hers. One of her most personally satisfying scientific discoveries was that the seemingly botched results of her experiments on silicon electrodes for her college senior thesis could now “be explained by a complete paradigm shift in science. There were just phenomena that could not have been imagined in 1963.” She writes that “the reductionist core of the old science has been breached. We have had to abandon the model of the universe in which tiny hard particles interact and collide to produce, through a series of ineluctable, irreversible steps, the macroscopic world as we know it.”

"I have respect for the child and the teenage persons of myself. I undertook this with the feeling that I had to return to them, that I could learn from them, that their experiences were not something to be put away."

These previously undiscovered phenomena and the conceptual shifts in science in recent decades lead Ehrenreich to an astonishing speculation in her final chapter. She wonders if hers and similar experiences could be an attempt at contact from another kind of being—not God; Ehrenreich remains an atheist—but something like what scientists call “an emergent quality, something greater than the sum of all its parts.”

Asked about this idea, Ehrenreich says, “We don’t have the data. Let me say that scientifically. We don’t know enough about the experiences other people have. I suspect many people have uncanny, unaccountable experiences that they attribute to something conventional—God or what they’ve been told God is. Or they put it aside completely. What I’m saying in this book is, let’s not bury this anymore. Something happens often enough to enough of us that we ought to know what it is. The urgency for me is sharpened by my critique of science and its unwillingness in so many ways to acknowledge that there are other conscious agencies or could be in the universe than just ourselves.”

And does Ehrenreich now believe that she’s risen to the challenge made by her earlier self? “I do feel I’ve done my best to discharge my responsibility to her.”

In a frank and richly evocative memoir, the author of Under the Tuscan Sun recalls growing up in the Deep South.

Why did you feel now was the right time to write a memoir of your coming-of-age?
Moving from California (where I lived and worked for decades) back to the South reconnected me on many levels with the land I came from originally. Some of the connections were simple and primitive—the fecund and flowery smells, the cheerful sounds of the tree frogs, the grating drama of cicadas, the grand sunsets and the intense humidity. Maybe the sensory world where you first breathed and walked never leaves you. Feeling so at home again naturally brought up early memories. And they seemed to want to come to the light.

You write in depth about your parents’ drinking and how it painted your childhood, saying theirs was a marriage of “Southern Comfort, recriminations, and if onlys.” Was it hard to reveal this part of your life to readers?
Shame is a powerful emotion and a silencing one. I don’t feel shame but can see why I might. They were who they were. They operated under some pretty intense cultural pressures, and they burned out so early that they never had a chance to emerge into larger versions of themselves. I’m always sad for that. As parents, they were not ideal, but they did have wonderful qualities as well—gusto, humor, passion, generosity.

There are so many exquisite details in the book: the shape of your daddy’s fingernails, the hospital room where you visited your grandmother. Did you keep detailed journals as a kid, or do you have an incredible memory of certain moments?
My little red, locked diary is still on my desk. I kept notebooks always, and even a reading log. These stacks of journals are disappointing because they record events, not observations or feelings. But it’s odd—as I read them, the details come rushing back. The plain words unlock memory, and I can again feel the images and nuances.

You paint an endearing portrait of Willie Bell, who worked as a maid for your parents throughout your childhood. How influential a figure was she in your life?
As I wrote, it was not a Mammy sort of thing. She quietly offered me a perspective on the chaotic life within our house. So often she said, “When are you going to learn? Just don’t talk back.” I saw only in later years that she was revealing her own survival tactics as well as trying to keep me from getting switched! 

At one point, you write that you might have lived forever in Fitzgerald, Georgia. What do you think kept that from happening?
My mother! She wanted for me what she never achieved—a big life. An unconfined life. Even though I battled her about my local boyfriends she feared I would marry, her constant get-out-of-Dodge stance seeped in. By high school, I was planning my escape to the North, the forbidden land, the dreaded land. I only made it as far as Virginia at first!

As a child, you didn’t know the word racism. Looking back now, how racist was the time and place in which you grew up?
Oh, Lord. Give me a volume to write! It is very hard now to imagine the racism. And not only in the South. Beneath the violence and unfairness and craziness, I always sense that a deeper vein of connection binds blacks and whites in the South than ever has been explained.

How have you settled into life in North Carolina?
Love it! My husband, Ed, and I have had the great good luck to fall in with a group of writers, artists, cooks, readers, gardeners. We are having a fine time down here. We have a big creaky old house with a porch, many remodeling projects, and two gentlemen cats. I am loving roving around the South, as I did in my youth.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of this book.

Tom Robbins had no intention of writing a memoir. “I was conned into it by the women in my life,” he says with a laugh during a call to his home in the small town of La Conner, Washington.

“They had been pestering me to write down the stories that I’d been telling them—bidden and unbidden—over the years. I wrote 20 pages and showed it to them, thinking that would shut them up. But it had the opposite effect.”

Bless the women in Tom Robbins’ life! They forced him into committing to paper Tibetan Peach Pie, a book that in conversation Robbins calls “an account of my personal pursuit of the marvelous” and in print carries the subtitle “A True Account of an Imaginative Life.” The book is both of these—and more.

Robbins calls his colorful new memoir “an account of my personal pursuit of the marvelous.”

Robbins, as fans of novels like Another Roadside Attraction (1971), Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976), Jitterbug Perfume (1980) or Villa Incognito (2003) know, has a Trickster spirit. He performs a sort of verbal-spiritual-comedic magic on the page. He characterizes his philosophical outlook, formed in part from his interest in Japan and Zen Buddhism, as “crazy wisdom and sacred mischief.”

“When I was in Japan,” he explains, “I got to have an audience with a famous Ninja, quite an old man. His house was full of Mickey Mouse memorabilia. This is true of the wisest people I have encountered in my life. They have all had this sense of playfulness. I think I was more or less born with it. It’s maintaining a fixed eye on the ultimate seriousness of life, but refusing to take events and, particularly, yourself too seriously.”

This energy and perspective also infuses Robbins’ memoir. Beginning as a child growing up in North Carolina and Virginia in the 1930s, Robbins writes that he was possessed by a seemingly inborn bohemianism and a “congenitally comic sensibility” that led his mother to lovingly refer to him as Tommy Rotten. He had a wandering, freedom-seeking spirit. He spent time in a military boarding school (where in a quixotic effort he foolishly re-entered a burning dormitory), time at Washington and Lee University (where Tom Wolfe, a founder of new journalism, was a big man on campus), and time in the U.S. Air Force in Korea (where he taught techniques of weather observation). He had four short marriages early in adulthood and, since 1987, a long one. He was an early, enthusiastic adopter of LSD and describes the first time he tried it as “the most rewarding day of my life, the one day I would not trade for any other.” He writes about, among many other events, encounters with Timothy Leary and Charles Manson and trips to far-flung regions of the world.

But Robbins also had an early love of words and stories. He won prizes—even in Air Force story-writing contests—for his fiction. He became a journalist. He was an art critic and music critic for underground newspapers in Seattle. And then he went to a concert by The Doors.

“It was so unlike any rock concert that Seattle had seen to that point. It just blew everybody away. I was in almost a traumatized state, an ecstatic trauma, when I went back to my house and up into the attic and sat down to write the review. It wasn’t that I was influenced by particular lyrics or by Jim Morrison’s style. It was such a cathartic experience that it loosened up something in my creative process. Almost instinctively I wrote the review. And then I thought, this is the way I want to sound from now on.”

Robbins’ first published novel, Another Roadside Attraction, became a kind of anthem of ’60s (or early ’70s) youth culture. “In that novel,” Robbins says, “I attempted not to write about the ’60s but to recreate the ’60s. In order to do that, I had to reinvent the novel, because the traditional novel moves from minor climax to minor climax to major climax, up an incline plane. But that didn’t lend itself to capturing that period with any depth or truth.”

“Sometimes the muse shows up and sometimes she doesn’t. But at least she knows where you’ll be at 10 o’clock in the morning. She doesn’t have to look for you in the bars or along the beaches.”

That novel captured the zeitgeist so successfully that to this day people assume that Robbins writes while stoned and that his sensibilities are trapped in the ’60s. These assumptions make Robbins laugh. He writes in the memoir that he is a slow and deliberate writer who avoids even mild stimulants while working and that the concerns of his novels have moved further forward into issues of contemporary life than the outdated views of his critics. Robbins’ beautifully profligate prose is labored over one sentence at a time. “If you’re a professional, you show up every day,” he says. “Sometimes the muse shows up and sometimes she doesn’t. But at least she knows where you’ll be at 10 o’clock in the morning. She doesn’t have to look for you in the bars or along the beaches.”

However, for the genre of fiction and the genre of memoir, Robbins waits on slightly different muses. About writing fiction, Robbins says, “I am one of the rare breed of writers who believes that the best part of writing is creating situations in which language can happen. I have to surround the act of writing with an aura of surprise and terror. So I take my research and imagination and my sense of humor and my vague feelings of where I want my day to go and pack them into my little canoe and push out onto the vast and savage ocean and see where the current takes me.”

Of this memoir he says, “I’m not inventing situations, I’m dealing with facts. The challenge for me was to keep the language lively and unpredictable, while remaining faithful to the facts.”

In July, Robbins will turn 82. That hardly seems possible given the antic energy of Tibetan Peach Pie. Wikipedia  and the Library of Congress can’t believe it either—they assert that Robbins is 4 years younger. “Wikipedia,” Robbins wryly notes, “is the fountain of youth. They obviously know more about me than my mother.”

These days Robbins goes to yoga and pilates classes, travels with his wife Alexa, and still shows up on time for his muse. In other words he stays connected with the women we must thank for his new memoir.

“I’ve had a messy life,” Robbins admits. “But in the tangle, I think the silver thread of spirituality, the red thread of passion and, of course, the elastic and multicolored thread of imagination have constantly run through it. And all of that is bound together with the inky thread of writing.”

That’s a self-assessment that sounds just about right.

Author photo credit Jeff Corwin.

This article was originally published in the June 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In her lovely new memoir, My Salinger Year, Joanna Rakoff takes readers on a tour of mid-1990s New York City—from the hallowed halls of an esteemed literary agency to the not-yet-gentrified streets of Williamsburg—as she settles in to her first real job.

What inspired you to write the book? Is there any significance to the timing of the publication?
This is a surprisingly difficult and complicated question, as My Salinger Year could also be called “The Book I Kept Trying Not to Write!”

The story is this: Many years ago, when I was trying to make my way as a freelance magazine writer—and largely failing—I called the most seasoned, accomplished journalist in my acquaintance, veteran Times reporter Ralph Blumenthal, and begged him to have coffee with me, in the hopes that he’d be able to help me find my way. Somehow, we got to talking about my first job, working for J.D. Salinger’s agent, answering his fan mail, and I explained that I began corresponding with some of the fans, and that Salinger decided to publish a new book during my stint at the agency. And Ralph just looked at me and said, “You need to write about this.” I’m not a person who tends to write much about myself—I was working on a novel at the time and all my magazine pieces were straight journalism—so I just sort of laughed nervously, though I knew he was right.

But it took me years to follow his advice, in part because the culture of “the Agency,” as I call it in the book, is one of secrecy. Or perhaps privacy would be a better term. So much of our time and energy was spent protecting Salinger’s privacy. And it was very clear that I was not meant to speak about Salinger outside of the office. It was a bit like working for the CIA.

Anyway, in 2003, I finally wrote a piece—a long essay—on answering Salinger’s fan mail, and I was naively shocked by the response it got! I was in Maine, at a friend’s wedding, when the piece came out, and reporters began calling the house, trying to interview me, purely because I’d met Salinger once. Editors and agents contacted me as well, asking if I’d turn the essay into a book. But I was still working on that novel, and I didn’t want to put it on hold. And I already had an agent, who said, “Listen, if you write a book on Salinger before your novel comes out, you’ll be known as ‘the Salinger Girl.’ That’s not you. We don’t want that. Finish your novel.”

I followed her advice. That novel, A Fortunate Age, came out in 2009. And I began working on another one (Money or Love, which should be complete by the end of this year), but when Salinger died, I wrote another piece about working at the Agency, and was again overwhelmed by the attention it received. That piece was turned into a full-length radio documentary for the BBC, and as I wrote the script for that documentary—and researched both Salinger and his fans, and the era during which I worked for “the Agency”—a larger story, a story of social change, a story about coming of age at the moment the digital revolution arose, began to materialize. When I was approached, again, about turning the story into a book, I still hesitated. For a few months even. But then, one day, the first few pages of the book sort of floated into my head. I sat down and pounded them out, and the narrative arc began to take shape for me. I said yes.

I think the truth is that I needed time. It was almost 20 years ago, now, that I worked at the Agency. I needed those years to see the story for what it was.

"Salinger had never been anything but kind and funny to me on the phone, and after reading his works I found myself, strangely or no, perhaps a bit more nervous about talking to him. A bit more in awe of him. Though since I was the most naïve, awkward, young person ever to have lived, “more nervous” isn’t saying all that much."

Did you consult any of your former colleagues at “the Agency” either while writing the book or later, to let them know it’s coming out? Will it be the first they’ve heard of your personalized responses to Salinger’s fan mail, or did they already know?
I did! Perhaps because one’s first job is such a formative experience, I stayed in touch with a good number of my co-workers from that time. The character known as “Max” in the book is one of my favorite people in the world, and I was glad for the excuse to sit down and talk with him about that time. I also had some long lunches with two of the assistants with whom I worked—one of whom is now a big-deal agent in her own right—and some others, and it was just fascinating to see what people remember and what they don’t. One person remembered, so clearly, all the little physical details of the office: The strange steel cases in which we kept what were known as “cards”—these bits of paper on which we recorded when and where a particular manuscript was sent. The color of the enormous filing cabinets.

Most of the my co-workers still work in publishing, but one, the agent known as James was rather difficult to track down. He’d been at the Agency for something like ten years when I left, and though he had his own office and was taking on clients, he was still officially an assistant. To me, he represented a very particular corner of New York life: He lived on the Upper East Side and wore crisp Brooks Brothers shirts, and his wife was something of a socialite. So I was surprised to discover him living off the grid in Vermont, on a farm, with chickens. I drove up to visit him, and it was wonderful to see this person I remembered as rather tense looking almost exuberant with happiness.

Because I’ve already written a couple of essays on my highly unorthodox  responses to the fans, I don’t know if my co-workers will be all that surprised. I heard through the grapevine that my old boss was “tickled” by that first essay I wrote, back in 2003, and I do hope it’s true! At the risk of sounding hokey: I wrote this book from a place of love and admiration. This is not a gossipy tell-all. Or a take-down. It’s not The Devil Wears Prada.

Like you, I first read Salinger in my mid-20s, and so I loved your description of devouring his works in a weekend.  How did having read his books impact how you felt about your job? About Salinger, himself?
I say in the book that my boss—and the Agency, as a whole—felt less like a business and more like a temple: There was an almost religious quality to their work, as if Salinger were a god, and the other well-known writers to whom they tended—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Dylan Thomas, to name a few—were demi-gods. Our job was to protect and serve them, in every way.  Before I read Salinger, it was easy for me to scoff at this, but—and this is the truth—after I read his works, I thought, “okay, I get it.” I thought, “he really is a genius. And he really is, in a way, too sensitive—too something—for this world. He needs the Agency’s protection.” My job took on newfound importance. I became a true believer. It was a bit like being inculcated into a cult!

Salinger had never been anything but kind and funny to me on the phone, and after reading his works I found myself, strangely or no, perhaps a bit more nervous about talking to him. A bit more in awe of him. Though since I was the most naïve, awkward, young person ever to have lived, “more nervous” isn’t saying all that much.

What’s behind your decision to refer to your boss as simply “my boss” and the agency as simply “the Agency”?
I struggled, for some time, to find the right tone and style for the book. The first person doesn’t come naturally to me, so that was part of it, but I was also nervous that my story—the story I had to tell—was just so small and insignificant. For the first six months—or year—of working on the book, I had trouble truly immersing myself in it, giving myself over to it.

Meanwhile, I’d been struggling to figure out pseudonyms for all the characters—as I wanted them in place early on, so that I could begin thinking of them more as true characters, if that makes sense—but I couldn’t figure out anything for my boss. As a placeholder, I simply called her “my boss” and in doing so suddenly everything fell into place. Somehow, by calling the agency “the Agency” and my boss “my boss,” it made the story more universal, larger, and allowed me to think of it as something slightly outside myself.

I also, you’ll notice, never name “my college boyfriend.” He’s just “my college boyfriend.”

Typewriters, Dictaphones—What was the single most bizarre practice that you encountered at the Agency?
Oh, gee! How to choose! Well, taking dictation—if that’s the right term for what I did, which was typing letters that my boss had dictated into her recorder—was pretty strange. It feels incredibly intimate, this voice murmuring in your ear. But perhaps the strangest, funniest little task came about when the Agency obtained a computer. One computer for the entire office, with one email account. I was allowed to use the computer purely for Agency business, including checking the Agency email, and printing out any pertinent notes for my boss, who would then dictate responses for me, which I would then type, on my typewriter, and after she approved them, retype them into the computer.

Whatever became of Don? Did he publish his novel?
Don, alas, never found a publisher for his novel. He did, however, publish a nonfiction book—part memoir, part straight nonfiction—about boxing, and another book about Brooklyn. I’ve not read either, but I’m told that I appear in each. As he got older, the age of the women he dated remained the same. (Or so I’m told.) He never married.

You left the Agency after a year. Where was your next position? Have you ever regretted not having chosen the path to becoming a literary agent?
After I left the Agency, I went to work for an agent who’d briefly merged her own independent agency with the Agency. We overlapped just momentarily there, but I really loved her, and when she left the Agency, she offered me a job. Because she was an independent agent—she worked out of her home, a beautiful, enormous apartment overlooking the Hudson—she allowed me more flexibility with hours, which, in turn, allowed me to enroll in Columbia’s MFA program, where I began writing for magazines, under the tutelage of Lis Harris and Alice Quinn. She’s a wonderful person—and a wonderful agent—and became a sort of older sister or aunt figure in my life. I loved her—love her—and loved working for her, but it became abundantly clear to me, during my time with her, that I don’t have the right personality to be an agent. I just don’t have the social or business instincts necessary for that line of work.

So, no, I’ve never regretted not becoming an agent. I’m too fond of sitting in bed, in my pajamas, inventing lives or chronicling my own.

How did your time at the Agency impact your own development as a writer?
In a way, working at the Agency made me a writer. All those letters to the Salinger fans? They lent me confidence and authority. They were my first real works! Somehow, writing as Joanna Rakoff of the Agency—rather than just plain old Joanna Rakoff—allowed me to be more bold and forthright, to jump off a cliff in the way you need to when writing.

But working at the Agency also demystified publishing for me in a profound and important way. Knowing how publishing worked allowed me, as a writer, to simply forget about the business side of writing and just write. I didn’t burn energy worrying or wondering about how to get published. The Agency taught me that good work gets published. My job was simply to make my work as good as it could possibly be. Not to worry about how it would get out in the world.

If you had to choose one adjective to describe your “Salinger Year,” what would it be, and why?
Transformative. Exhilarating. Fun. (That’s three. Sorry.)

What’s next for you?
Well, I’m working on a novel, Money or Love, about a trio of families whose lives have been wrecked—in different ways—by the economic crisis of 2008. Cheerful, I know! But I love these characters—even the banker who ends up making money off his neighbors’ bad loans; even the awful, emotionally frozen loser husband, who’d rather let his wife apply for food stamps than get a blue-collar job—and I look forward to spending time with them every day. I keep hoping I can find a happy ending for them. . . .

Author photo credit David Ignaszewski.

A portion of this article was originally published in the June 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of this book.

Dante scholar Joseph Luzzi recounts his immigrant childhood and his complicated relationship with his parents’ homeland in a captivating new memoir, My Two Italies.

Why did you decide to write this book?
I’ve wanted to write My Two Italies for some 20 years now, ever since I began my graduate studies in Italian at Yale in 1994. From the moment I decided to turn my love for Italian into my career path, I felt a strong desire to share my fascination with the immigrant southern Italian world I came from and the cultural treasures from northern Italy I was studying. But, of course, back then I wasn’t nearly knowledgeable or capable enough to write a book of this nature; I had lots of learning ahead of me.

So I kept this project in the back of my mind for many years, until finally, in 2011, the year of Silvio Berlusconi’s resignation from the premiership amid a welter of controversy, the time seemed ripe. I had by then started writing about Italy and culture for non-specialist audiences—mostly essays and reviews—and I sensed that something momentous was happening in Italy, some transition that would fundamentally affect the nation for generations to come. At that point, I felt I had to tell my story and share my understanding of Italian and Italian-American culture because I truly believed that it was impossible to understand the crises that Italy was undergoing—its political struggles under Berlusconi, its ongoing battle with corruption, the tensions between its youth and an aging population—without going back (in some cases way back, all the way to Dante) in Italian history. It was then that I believed my family history could bring readers inside some of the mysteries of Italian culture writ large.

You say that you’re “Italian and American” as opposed to being an “Italian-[hyphen] American.” What’s the distinction—as you see it?
When I was growing up, I wanted nothing to do with either the “Italian” world of my parents and older siblings—all of whom were born in Calabria in the Italian south—or the “Italian-American” world of spaghetti and meatballs, Godfather movies, and bocce tournaments that surrounded me. Like most kids, I just wanted to fit in, blend in with the other americani. It’s impossible to overstate just how not typically “suburban American” my parents were, even though we actually lived in the lovely coastal suburbs of Rhode Island. My parents raised their own livestock (there seemed to be slaughtered chickens everywhere I turned), cured sausage and prosciutto in the cellar, and made me bring to school these horrifying pepper-and-egg sandwiches on homemade rolls that would drip grease on the aluminum foil when I sat down to eat them in the lunchroom. I imagined that all the other kids were staring at my freakish meal—I would have given anything for one of their bland, patriotic peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches on Wonder Bread. So I was in between two worlds: too much a child of my Calabrian parents to fit in with the kids in the cafeteria, yet too attuned to the English language and the American games and sports of my classmates to be as authentically “Italian” as the Calabrian branch of my family. There was no hyphen for me, with its implication of seamlessly blended ethnicities. That feeling of being both a bit—just a bit—Italian and American reminded me that I inhabited an ethnic limbo, separated from my parents’ Italian homeland while also wondering if I would ever truly fit into this new American world.

What was your relationship with your father like during his final years?
It was not an easy one. After I graduated from college in Boston, I moved back home for a while, and he would drive me to my job at a local copy shop on the University of Rhode Island campus. For a full forty-five minutes on the road he wouldn’t say a word to me. He would just stare ahead, grimly focused on the drive, listening to Salty Brine spin the oldies on a crackling AM radio station as we rolled past the turf farms of URI. The ride felt so symbolic: growing up, we never had those normal father-son conversations that, I imagined with wild jealousy, all my other friends enjoyed with their dads (at least that’s the way it appeared to work on TV). And yet I worshiped him. He had an aura about him, with the absolute command he emanated at home, and the astonishing care and perfectionism he put into everything he did, from his manicured garden and oversized vegetables to his legendary homemade wine. Even the waves of his salt-and-pepper hair fell perfectly into place. I realize now what I could not fathom then: we were from completely different worlds, and understanding between us was impossible. By my mid-20s I had graduated from college and held a series of half-baked jobs, just like the one at the copy shop he drove me to; by his mid twenties he had endured soul-crushing poverty, fought for Italy in World War II, and survived years as a military internee—essentially forced labor—in Nazi Germany. I think the ease of my life—which he must have seen as frivolity—embarrassed him.

I remember once, when I played for the number two spot on my high school tennis team, he showed up at the Weekapaug courts in his Chevy Malibu (the same one in which we would ride in silence). He had sworn to me before the match that he was going to pull me off the courts, “davant’ a tutti,” “in front of everyone,” because I was burning expensive holes in my sneakers that we could not afford to replace. He wanted me to play in work shoes. I tried to stare down my archrival, whose wealthy family had a tennis court in their backyard—but I couldn’t focus on his white Rossignol racket with my father haunting the parking lot, just an overhead smash away from the Atlantic Ocean. My father silently raged in the car while I played, my mother expressionless beside him. She must have talked him out of his plan: after the match he just drove away. Needless to say, I lost in straight sets.

Your daughter Isabel will turn 7 this year. Are you teaching her Italian?
I have tried to teach Isabel Italian in fits and starts, but I’m embarrassed to say that thus far I haven’t been able to put together a sustained plan. Part of the blame, I guess, is on my own laziness—since I teach Italian language and culture for a living it is hard for me to stay in work mode when I come home from campus and see Isabel. And I admit I find it somewhat artificial to speak to her in a different language from the English that’s being used all around us.

But there may be a deeper reason that has held me back. Growing up, I desperately wanted my parents, with their heavily accented attempts at English (for example, “she’s a’ no’ home” for “he’s not home”) to speak proper English, and I felt that mastering the language of our new American world would be the most important and effective way of assimilating. Plus, I fell in love with English. Books became a second home to me, as Shakespeare, Dickens, Hemingway, Joyce, and other masters of the English language became passports to alternate realms, past and present, that my working-class family could not afford to travel to. Although the Italian language is profoundly important to me, I wonder if the English I speak with Isabel is somehow making up for a connection to the “American” language that I felt was missing from my own childhood all those years ago.

Has your daughter taken on any of the Calabrian traits and values of your mother?

That’s a great question. . . . Yes, I do feel my parents in her in a way that sometimes floors me. Calabrians can be known—not so flatteringly—as teste dure, “hard heads,” capable of some pretty profound stubbornness. But I think it’s more than that. For centuries, life in this impoverished southern Italian region was extremely demanding, so much so that it became synonymous with la miseria, literally “the misery”—a term denoting pervasive hardship and scarcity that bred a fatalistic worldview about the inevitable suffering life entails. To survive in this world, you had to be tough—real tough. And my family had this quality in abundance, especially my father, who endured World War II, Nazi Germany, immigration, and a life of severe labor, both as a factory worker and a landscaper. I feel that, in my own life, when I’ve faced particularly challenging or daunting circumstances, I’ve been able to draw on this instinctual “Calabrian” residue of will, even hard-headedness, in confronting a problem and making it to the other side. My daughter Isabel is a wonderfully sweet and loving kid, but she has this iron will—she simply will not give in on certain things, no matter how much she is asked to do so. This has made for some trying moments as a parent—but I can also sense her Calabrian ancestry speaking through her, and deep down I pray that this “testa dura” quality will stay with her (or at least fully blossom when she’s 18 and away at college!).

Do you view “The Sopranos” and “Jersey Shore” as legitimate expressions of the Italian-American character—or is there such a thing?

Yes, I do believe that in some ways “The Sopranos” and “Jersey Shore” are legitimate expressions of the Italian-American character, and that’s partly why I find them so potentially troubling—and not because I think that they promote dangerous stereotypes about Italian Americans. I believe that most who watch these programs understand that they are not fully representative of the Italian-American “experience.” After all, Italian Americans have produced two Supreme Court justices, four mayors of New York City, a woman vice presidential candidate and a president of Yale, to name just a few of the more prominent. But I do think that “The Sopranos” and “Jersey Shore” strike a cord deep within the public about Italian-American culture—just as, before them, the Godfather films did. Most Italians are descendants from poor families in the Italian south, and thus were cut off from a lot of the cultural developments in northern Italy. Moreover, many southern Italians viewed Italian unification itself—a belated political process that only took place in 1861—as the spread of northern political power into the south (and thus, no cause for patriotic celebration). I think that many Italian immigrants carried with them, out of Italy and into America, this sense of alienation from both “high” Italian culture and a cohesive sense of Italian national identity. These immigrants—my parents among them—tended to identify more with their region than with Italy as a whole.

I don’t think it’s a surprise, therefore, that so many of the popular programs about Italian-American culture—including “The Sopranos” and “Jersey Shore”—often celebrate the more folkloric and popular aspects of their ancestors’ Italian lives, without going deeply into questions of how the immigrant Italian world relates to Italian history and culture outside of the south. As I write in My Two Italies, Italian-American culture is essentially southern Italian culture imported to the United States. Our southern Italian heritage is something to be celebrated. But I also think it would be interesting for Italian Americans to go beyond the usual pop-cultural clichés about the “Old Country” and ask ourselves what it means to be “Italian” in the context of the troubled relation between the Italian north and south, and how this relates to massively important Italian issues like its centuries-long political fragmentation and quest for a unifying language that stretches back to Dante.

Was there any particular event that prompted you to specialize in Italian studies?
It wasn’t so much a single event as a general awakening I experienced, a few years after college, pushing me in the direction of my parents’ world and all the memories it held. When I decided to get a Ph.D. in literature, there wasn’t any particularly compelling aspect of my background that suggested it should be in Italian. I hadn’t majored in Italian as an undergraduate, and though I did take a few courses in Italian as part of a Master’s program I had enrolled in before my doctorate, it was still an open question as to which path I would pursue. But when it came down to making a career decision, it became clear to me just how much sense it would make to combine my love for literature with the mysteries of the “two Italies” I had grown up with—the customs and traditions of my parents, with their alien acts like the blood pudding they made from pigs they slaughtered, and the dreams that Italy inspired in me, especially during the life-changing junior year abroad I had spent in Florence amid its Renaissance splendor. I didn’t know this at the time, but I was compelled along by a desire to reconcile these two worlds—to show how, for all their differences, they are still part of the same, single Italian culture.

My studies would in fact teach me that the Italian quest for a national tongue that obsessed such authors as Dante and Alessandro Manzoni also shaped the lives of immigrants like my father, who had to abandon his Calabrian dialect after immigrating to the United States, a move that would essentially make him a linguistic orphan (he lost Calabrian, never learned standard Italian, and could barely speak English). So the decision to specialize in Italian studies was one of those rare and wonderful instances where my heart and my head were in sync: rationally, I knew it would be wise to focus on a literary tradition that I both admired and had cultural roots in; emotionally, I felt pulled by my deep love for my parents and their lost homeland, and I wanted to dig into our family’s past and see just where the poetry of Dante and the blood puddings of my people could connect.

Do you ever feel that Italy—apart from its art—has little new to offer you?
Another very good, tough question. Obviously I love Italy, as I have made teaching and writing about it into my life’s work. I’m aware, however, that at times my connection to Italy has been affected by the experiences of my parents and the distance that they set between themselves and Calabria after emigrating from it in the late 1950s. For example, I’m often asked if I would want to apply for dual citizenship in Italy to go along with my American passport, and my answer has always been no, I would not. It’s very difficult for me to imagine myself as a citizen of any country beside the United States, including Italy, because I think of the incredible sacrifices that my parents had to endure to become American. They had to give up their Italian citizenship when they immigrated to the United States; more than that, they had to leave behind all their friends and families, basically their entire lives, so that we, their six children, could have a better life filled with more opportunities in America. And that has certainly been the case: just one generation after my father, who had only the slightest of a grade-school education, I was lucky enough to be able to go on and receive a doctorate. The idea, in a sense, of reversing the vector and reclaiming their lost, abandoned Italian citizenship seems somehow to do an injustice to all that my parents had to sacrifice.

Of course, I realize that one could argue just the exact opposite: by reclaiming the Italian citizenship my parents had lost, I would be restoring to our family a tie to Italy that my mother and father had been forced to sever. Perhaps. But it just doesn’t quite feel that way. . . . As I wrote in my book, my mom said something to me once that truly shocked me: my father, she said, had been happy in Calabria, even carefree. That is decidedly not the image of my overworked, overstressed father that I knew growing up. He and my mother had left a Calabria that, despite its poverty, was a relatively “happy and carefree” place for them, in order to build a new home on the other side of the world. Their journey has always seemed arduous, ferociously demanding, even cruel at times—and yet, more than anything, it has been a remarkable gift. Their gift to me, one that no child can ever repay, has been a life of boundless opportunity free from the hardships of Calabria.

I’ve been surprised by the evolution of My Two Italies. When I started writing it, I imagined it would be exclusively about Italy and Italian America. I now see that it is a book about la famiglia, the family, especially in its connection to the American experience and how profoundly linked that has been to immigration. I’m in awe of my parents’ courage and resolve in embracing immigration and all that it would take from them, and I hope that my book will honor their journey.

A portion of this article was originally published in the July 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a review of this book.