“Flavia Alaya has written a memoir with a rare elegiac style. She works the supreme magic of combining a deeply personal story whilst narrating a fascinating history of a moribund Church. Deeply spiritual with love and tragedy, but finally, a woman triumphant.”

—Malachy McCourt, author of A Monk Swimming: A Memoir

“Here is a timeless passion, recalled with a historian’s precision. But it is also a modern political document. Because these lovers took the definitions with which their times tried to imprison them—definitions of woman, of priest, of powerlessness—and transformed them, first in their own lives, and then out in the world.”

—Nuala O’Faolain, author of Are You Somebody?: The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman

“Flavia Alaya’s richly textured story kept me up half the night, riveted by its dauntless passion and fierce insight. For those of us who are Italian Americans and sometime Catholics, Alaya’s tale will have special power in its unraveling of mysteries and sanctities that shaped our lives. But her headlong rush toward remembrance of things past will have extraordinary resonance, too, for all who have lived, loved, lost—and won.”

—Sandra M. Gilbert, author of Ghost Volcano

Vertigo

eISBN: 9781558617773 | ISBN: 9781558613959

Louise DeSalvo

Born to immigrant parents during World War II and coming of age during the 1950s, DeSalvo finds herself rebelling against a script written by parental and societal expectations. In her revealing family memoir, DeSalvo sifts through painful memories to give voice to all that remained unspoken and unresolved in her life: a mother’s psychotic depression, a father’s rage and violent rigidity, a sister’s early depression and eventual suicide, and emerging memories of childhood incest. At times humorous and often brutally candid, DeSalvo also delves through the more recent conflicts posed by marriage, motherhood, and the crisis that started her on the path of her life’s work: becoming a writer in order to excavate the meaning of her life and community.

In Vertigo, Louise DeSalvo paints a striking picture of the easy freedom of the husband and fatherless world of working-class Hoboken, New Jersey, the neighborhood of her early childhood, where mothers and children had an unaccustomed say in the running of their lives while men were off defending their country, but were jolted back into submission when World War II ended. Hoboken was not a place where girls were encouraged to develop their minds, or their independent spirits, yet it is that tenement-dotted city with its pulse and energy, wonderful Italian pastry, and sidewalk roller-skating contests, and not suburban Ridgefield, where the family moves when Louise is seven, that claims Louise’s heart.