Italy Revisited: Conversations with My Mother

Taking an unconventional approach to autobiographical writing, this work serves as a double memoir, told in dialogue between a mother and a daughter. The conversation takes place in a medieval town high up in the Italian mountains, as the author, a Canadian writer, draws out her mother’s childhood memories of life in southern Italy at the beginning of the 20th century. As they re-create that vanished world, the pair also finds greater understanding of the tumultuous relationships that sometimes exist between immigrant mothers and their children.