Messina wrote at a time when nearly one-third of the island’s population left in search of better lives, but the stories they left behind took almost a century to surface in history and fiction. Since most immigrants could not write, they told their stories in Italian or in a more obscure dialect few Americans or other Italians could understand. Often their stories died untold, even to their children who were busy becoming Americans. Or, if told, they were dwarfed by the giant myths of men. Through her stories, Messina becomes a firsthand witness, especially to the stories of those who stayed behind, mainly women, and the stories of those who returned brokenhearted, incapacitated, and ready to die.

Inside Messina’s stories, alongside peasant life and work and the desire to escape to places like the United States, we also find middle-class daughters forced by convention to remain hidden in their father’s houses, isolated in a world they did not create and that they cannot control. These are the stories we have not known, filled with sorrows invisible to those of us celebrating the success of Italian Americans. These stories, repressed by generation after generation and maintained by silence, come to us now through deserved reconsideration of Messina’s artistry. They connect us to a past that will change the ways in which we characterize Italian life and immigration.

I heard only vague references, when I was a kid, to those who were left behind or kept behind. I had seen women like the ones in these stories in my Little Italy neighborhood, but I never understood what they may have experienced until I read Messina’s stories. As my grandmother used to say, whenever I’d ask her something that obviously pained her, “Why do you want to know about those things; it was miseria and we should forget about it.” But Messina records what no man had ever recorded—the misery of women whose lives were sacrificed to fear; and the misery of some who left Sicily for the United States; and the misery of others who could not leave—and she does it in a way that makes all that miseria matter.

Messina’s stories provide a link between women’s imagination and women’s history, both missing from the historical and literary record. The pure sadness here ultimately transcends that emotion to provide a view of real life in process. Less romantic than Helen Barolini’s Umbertina and more earthy than the late Tina DeRosa’s Paper Fish, Messina’s stories unleash closely observed realism. Ideas of destiny, figura, omerta—a man’s honor and how a woman reflects it—combine in these stories to reveal and challenge a mythic family structure oppressive to women and ultimately demeaning to men as well, and for too long the basis of the ways in which we have consumed and used Sicilian culture.