Night Bloom: An Italian-American Life

by Mary Cappello

Of the mysterious Night Blooming Cereus, Mary Cappello writes: "The flower fell into our neighborhood like a shooting star." That neighborhood was a working-class suburb of Philadelphia riven by class distinction and haunted by contradiction. In tracing the marks that immigration and assimilation have left on her Italian-American family, Cappello also offers us her family's unsung art-their gardens, letters, and rosary beads-for the lessons they teach us about desire, creativity, and loss.

Genres: Memoir

280 pages, Paperback

First published November 3, 1998

About the author

Mary Cappello is a writer and professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Rhode Island. She is the author of four books of literary nonfiction, and her essays and experimental prose have been published in The Georgia Review, Salmagundi and Cabinet Magazine. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Salon, The Huffington Post, in guest author blogs for Powell's Books, and on six separate occasions as Notable Essay of the Year in Best American Essays. A 2011 Guggenheim Fellow in Creative Arts/Nonfiction, she recently received a 2015 Berlin Prize from The American Academy in Berlin, a fellowship awarded to scholars, writers, composers, and artists who represent the highest standards of excellence in their fields.

Cappello is originally from Darby, Pennsylvania, a suburb outside Philadelphia. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. from State University of New York, Buffalo, and her B.A. from Dickinson College. Cappello has taught at the University of Rhode Island, as a Fulbright Lecturer at the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow, Russia, and at the University of Rochester.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

Family histories, family secrets, family gardens: a great-grandfather who had an affair, a grandfather who was a cobbler who gardened and wrote, a father who beats his two sons. Silences and gaps and a family transplanted, but also a family making things grow, planting hedges and flowers and herbs. In this book Cappello writes about her working-class Italian American family and their life, over decades, in Pennsylvania. She reads her grandfather's journals, which her mother saved after his death, and is surprised by the grace co-existing with the struggle, how he wrote about the beauty of the sky on a certain day, even as he struggled to pay the gas and electric bills, even as he and his family were cold at home in fall and winter, in the rain and in the snow.

Cappello writes about her Catholic-school education, the strictures of it and the freedom she found in dancing, the culture of sin and confession (I love this: "I climb out of the confessional box. I am covered with confetti. I have nothing to confess. I have never had anything to confess" (184-185).) She writes about her own queerness and the idea that her whole family, culturally, was "queer," immigrants on the edge of a country, of a culture. She writes about the solace of words, for herself and also for her family members: she writes about trips to the library with her agoraphobic mother, and about the letters her mother and her grandfather both wrote, "letters like lines strung with lanterns reaching toward some other" (67). Elsewhere, there's this, which I find really satisfying: the writing reproduces in the reader the pleasure Cappello feels:

Snapdragons, if you press the hairy underside of their throats ever so gently, will speak. As a child, I wanted to eat every blossom in my father's garden, until I learned the pleasure in my mouth of their names: calla lily, cosmos, rose eclipse, dahlia. As an adult, I keep The Field Guide to Wild Flowers on the same shelf with books of poems: "fragrant bedstraw," "wild madder," "grass-of-parnassus," "night-flowering catchfly," "ragged robin," "shooting star." (3)

Flowers appear over and over in this book: the buttercups a young Cappello brought home from an empty lot to plant in the garden, not knowing they were weeds; the lunaria (honesty, money plant) that Cappello's father grew and dried and gave to his Sicilian family members; the Night-Blooming Cereus of the book's title, flowering in her grandfather's garden twenty years before she was born, another Night-Blooming Cereus blossoming, later, in her father's garden, and cuttings from that plant blooming in her own house. This is a meditative memoir, a contemplative one: the person who read this book before me (I found my copy on the street) seems to have been frustrated by it: the marginal notes say things like "dull" or "show a scene" or "too much explanation." While I wasn't totally smitten with this book—its particular tones and lyricisms didn't entirely resonate with me—I did enjoy it, including its slow pace.

[Jonny · Rating 3 out of 5]

OK, this is a memoir of a sort by an Italian-American lesbian. She writes about these dream-like writings and poems by her immigrant grandfather about life and the helplessness of poverty in Philly. Haunting--would have liked this taken farther and deeper. Also she wrote about her mother-- a phobic yet creative butterfly who left her father; her father who was an abusive bully yet an avid gardener, and her own struggles with anxiety and depression. And rosary beads, and her fantasy order of nuns, the Gay Sisters of Ordinary Time! Many textured contradictions, she talked about her family and herself, and while she pulled it seeming too self-indulgent, I also wasn't quite all there with them. Though many of the family traits were recognizable (especially the neuroses!)