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 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.

Richard Blanco first became widely known when he was selected to write a poem for Barack Obama’s second presidential inauguration in 2012. Blanco, who was working as a civil engineer and writing poetry on the side, had been born in Madrid to Cuban immigrant parents and come to the U.S. as a child, eventually settling with his extended family in Miami. His selection as the inaugural poet marked a number of firsts: He was the first Latino, first immigrant and first openly gay writer chosen for the role.

In an alternately hilarious and moving new memoir, The Prince of los Cocuyos, Blanco looks back on his childhood in Miami: his close family, his domineering grandmother, his struggle to be a "real" American (one who ate Easy Cheese and went to Disney World) and his conflicted feelings about his emerging sexuality.

We caught up with Blanco at the 2014 Southern Festival of Books to find out more his fresh and vivid portrayal of "becoming."

First I’d like to ask about the title of the book. What is the significance of it and why did you choose it?
There are two reasons. “El Cocuyito” is the name of my granduncle’s Cuban grocery store, where I started working when I was 12. And it’s the proverbial village where, as I like to say, I learned to be Cuban, learned to fall in love with my Cuban heritage and really learn about it beyond the nostalgia and beyond the misconceptions I had about where I was from. So the grocery store plays a big role in the book, and the “prince” idea relates to the idea of the village, which raised me in a way. And the cocuyos are fireflies, so of course there’s the magic of that. They’re lightning bugs, and like every kid I used to trap them in jars.

Did your publisher give you any pushback on using Spanish words in the title?
Not at all.  I was very surprised because it’s something I’ve always heard is met with horror—a bilingual title. But they didn’t blink. They loved it. And I knew it was a chance, but I also feel like it’s time. We obviously have text that’s in Spanish and English; this has become commonplace. But it’s interesting how few Latino authors dare to put Spanish in a title. I wanted to take the dare. And cocuyos is just a funky, cool, kooky word and in some ways, the fun part is people trying to pronounce it.

On a related question, I noticed that you mostly don’t translate the Spanish words that you use in the memoir. What was your thinking behind that?
It’s really annoying to translate everything that someone says in Spanish. When you use Spanish in a text, it’s not just for meaning but for sound. But I always try to set it up contextually, so that you’re never lost, or translate it in context, which is the real challenge of writing in that way. I don’t have a choice because my family and my community—I don’t hear them in English, I hear them in Spanish. And so the compromise is to have some English and some Spanish.

Why did you decide to write a memoir, to translate your experiences “not into poetry but into prose”?
I actually started this project about four years ago. Part of it, at first, was just creative curiosity and wanting to see how it is that prose worked. And I was also driven by a sense that every genre has its limitations—its strengths and its weaknesses. There were so many stories that I still wanted to tell and unpack from the poetry. And you can’t really do that kind of broad characterization in a poem—characters like my mother and my grandmother. My poems are narrative so they’re story-like, but of course, even that has its limitations.

Part of what I learned is that poetry is super-compressed; it’s about the emotional core of people in a situation. And writing in prose is more about storytelling, and that’s fun too. I always had to be cautious about not going down the poetry wormhole, and going on for three pages describing the sofa. It was interesting to challenge myself to adhere to a narrative, to try to construct a narrative out of pieces of memory. And that was fascinating. I also learned by contrast more of what poetry is all about—by working in another genre.

Was there anything in your personal life that you struggled with whether to reveal?
Yes and no. Part of it is that I’m insulated by language. A lot of the elders in my community and in my family have a working knowledge of English but they wouldn’t read a whole book of mine in English. For that matter, they wouldn’t read a whole book of poetry. So I’ve always had a little bit of a barrier, a little bit of a cushion, so to speak.

I don’t know if I could have written this book if my grandmother were still alive. I think everything happens the way it’s supposed to happen. But then again, the book is not about family scandal or gossip. Part of why I like to tell stories is to, in a sense, revere and honor my community. And so there’s always a tone of love and honesty in my work, even though the memoir gets a little more dangerous (laughter).

You mentioned your grandmother, who is such a big part of your story. You write that this book let you “hate her, understand her, forgive her, and thank her.” How do you think she would react to your characterization of her, and would she understand you better if she were able to read it?
I think she would understand more of what I was going through. As an adult, you sometimes treat children as adults and you don’t realize that the words coming out of your mouth are 10 times more significant when you’re 7 years old than when you’re 17 or 27.

Part of what I hope the book will do is to let people like my grandmother or parents of gay teenagers understand the psychology of what a gay youth goes through—it’s a very subtle and slow process and you can’t come out until you’re ready to come out. There’s a series of all sorts of negotiations and translations of yourself that you need to go through. And I think my grandmother would understand that a hell of a lot better.

But also, by analyzing it, I now better understand where she was coming from. It’s a different brand of homophobia we’re dealing with, at least in my particular Cuban culture, and I think, perhaps, Latin American culture in general. The idea is not that being gay is an evil thing and you’re going to hell, the crime is really about being effeminate. So what my grandmother was trying to do was to say, “I know who you are, but here’s what we’re going to do.” Because in an odd, twisted way, she was experienced in that generation and culture, and she was preparing me: Be what you need to be, but … pass. The idea was that you behaved like a man regardless of what your sexuality was. You know, machismo, it’s a more important layer than all the rest.

You’re often asked about poets who have influenced you. Now that you’re a memoirist, I’d like to find out if there are memoirs that you especially admire.
Obviously, I read Carlos Eire’s Waiting for Snow in Havana. I thought it was wonderful, of course, but it was another layer of the story. It gave me something to build off of, so to speak. His experience of actually having memories of Cuba was different from my own, because I wasn’t born there. But I feel like I do have [memories of Cuba] at times, because the photographs become so real.

And then, Augusten Burroughs. At one time, as a working title, I would call my book Running with Mangoes. And he ended up doing a blurb for my book, and I think that’s what convinced him. Certainly it’s not the same story, but it has that bizarre, kooky, what-am-I-doing-here kind of feeling. And having come out the other end a much better person for it—I think it shared that. It resonated emotionally with me as well.

And there’s also Richard Hoffman’s memoir, Half the House. The inspiration comes from many sources.

You’ve been promoting The Prince of los Cocuyos for a couple of weeks now. Is there anything you’ve found especially gratifying or surprising about the way readers are reacting to the book?
I’m finding little pieces of the memoir that I never thought would be such a connecting point, like the Easy Cheese. At a reading in Brookline, a man brought me a gift. As soon as I held it in my hands, I knew what it was—three cans of Easy Cheese. I’m still munching on them. Those are the moments that, as a writer, always surprise you—what people connect with.

On the other hand, I have also been surprised by just how connected people still are to the inauguration and my role in that as a poet. It seems like something that will go on for my lifetime, and happily so.

How does your personal coming-of-age story mirror or represent the larger story of America?
The story of “becoming” is primordial; it’s trans-cultural. It doesn’t matter if you’re gay or straight, 50 or 15, we’re always becoming. There’s always a sense of transforming. It’s a fundamental part of the human psyche. We’re never really fully there. Just when you think you’ve got it all done, you have . . . grandchildren. The “you” is always this mirage just down the road, and when you get to it, it slips away from you. You’re kind of following yourself all your life to become who you already are.

I’ve been thinking about this idea of becoming, and in the process of my experience serving as inaugural poet, and if you look at a country, it also has an evolution, and a sense of its own becoming. And America right now is about 13. As a country, we’re young, and we’re still asking all these questions, just like little Riqui is asking in this memoir. Who are we? We’re having all these conversations about labels. Do we use labels? Do we not use labels? Nobody knows the answer.

I find that America is also, as a people, coming of age. We are becoming and deciding. We tend to be very impatient in our causes and the things that we want to see changed. And we think that the story begins and ends in our lifetimes. But the story of America will continue far beyond our lifetimes. And just because we haven’t reached what you thought was the end of the story, you have to realize that all you’re doing is adding a sentence, a word, a paragraph, and that the story continues. We’re not there yet, but that’s not the point. The point is, hopefully, as a democracy, we continue to “raise” this country, we continue to “rear” this country. Some days we go two steps back, some days two steps forward, depending on what side of the fence you’re looking at it from.

The idea of becoming is such an American idea that it parallels very much the personal stories of coming of age. If you really think about it, the questions I was asking as a child are in some ways the same questions that Whitman was asking not too long ago. Who are we? Who are we as a country? Do we distinguish ourselves or do we just blend? Is there a right thing to do? Is the ultimate aim of diversity to be un-diverse? What do we call “American”? We don’t know yet. We’re still a teenager, rambling about and figuring things out.