IT TAKES A LIFETIME TO LEARN TO LIVE: An Italian American Story of Coming Home, seeking family gynergy in Mama Italia

IT TAKES A LIFETIME TO LEARN TO LIVE: An Italian American Story of Coming Home
LIBBY CATALDI
Bordighera Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$20.00 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: It Takes a Lifetime to Learn How to Live is an intimate, multigenerational Italian American memoir immersed in the legacies of secrets, silence, and sacrifice of Southern Italy.

In 1915, Carmela leaves the remote village of Rotondella. Her daughter, Laura, grows up determined to sever the past in an effort to be fully American. But decades later, when her life collapses, Laura's daughter-the memoir's narrator-sets off alone to Italy in search of truth and belonging.

Her journey leads her back to her ancestral village, where she finds the open arms of family-and also uncovers the lingering shadows of the malocchio, omertà, rigid Catholicism, and a past of abject poverty, arranged marriage, patriarchal control, the Mafia, and a suspicion of sexual abuse.

She begins to understand how these forces shaped not only her grandmother's life, but also her mother's-and her own. By honoring the courage of the women who came before her, to risk and endure, she finds the grace to forgive, to heal, to make peace with her mother, and ultimately, to come home to herself.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I've been involved with multiple Italian-American families over the years, always enjoyably, mostly because they were descended from Southern Italian emigrants. I asked to read this book because I wanted to reinforce my good memories of the times I spent in the orbit of these clans.

Job done. Was much like hearing from The Beyond more of the stories I found so enjoyable. All the official patriarchy, all the real-life matriarchy, all the exciting stories of how the decision to come to the US was reached...or compelled...were all present and accounted for. It was Old Home Week, for me anyway, in all the most enjoyable ways.

Funny to call something "enjoyable" that starts in grinding, miserable poverty, misogyny, and class stratification and the social abuses the flow from that. It's more accurate to say that, these being ancestral stories told to the author then narrated to us removes immediacy from them. It's like any painful family memory. It smoothes out over time with retellings. Unlike to the person who lived it, we the audience know the ending, and it comes out fine.

Of course that's a failing of all memoirs. A person. like Author Cataldi, searching for family connections, has clearly ended up in a privileged position relative to those ancestors. It isn't suspenseful, so many people find memoir a bit of a snooze. I myownself enjoy the genre because I'm more invested in the "why" than the "what" as a rule. Why did Author Cataldi go seeking Rotondella and its denizens? Why was her need so powerful that she made an expensive and fairly extensive effort to investigate these origin stories?

I'm interested in her, not in some myth, in other words; I felt my curiosity assuaged, though it required some reading into spaces for that to happen.

Seeking the source of her family's gynergy was something that motivated Author Cataldi, and was powerful enough to compel me to go with her. I was very glad to have made the family's acquaintance.