Aunt Pig of Puglia

by Patricia Catto

"Patricia Catto’s memoir-in-stories recounts and embroiders, with humor and poignancy, her unforgettable family. The precocious narrator, “Pasquale” (the father’s male nickname for Patricia), introduces her battling parents and the Ferri relatives in a voice that is both formal and smart. With delightful sleight-of-hand, Catto locates herself and the tales in the Italian hometown of her émigré grandparents. Such playing with time and place is at the heart of Catto’s magic realism —since stories live everywhere and nowhere, as do their tellers. Indeed, when her angry mother chides her for not living in reality, Pasquale writes that she will “prove to the world that stories are absolutely what we live in.” Lyrical and funny and wise, Catto’s one-of-a-kind family memoir is a stunning valentine to story telling." – Catherine Browder, author of Secret Lives"An intimate, rather than private look at family life, Patricia Catto applies an impeccable ear and a Coppola-like eye to paint a wonderfully exquisite, moving memoir of the Italian-American experience. Grazie!" – Joey Nicoletti, author of Cannoli Gangster.The world of Patricia Catto’s memoir revolves on an axis drawn by Verga, Silone, Achebe and Flannery O’Connor, a comic folk gothic inhabited by the Death Sisters, Uncle Stroonze and the Bodhisattva Italiana, a place both small and grand in which marriages wait until the tomatoes are canned and “God always moves sideways.” It is a world of stories that demand to be told, and in this case told brilliantly. Brisk, frank and always funny, Aunt Pig of Puglia presents the labyrinthine consciousness of Catto’s intriguing (in all senses of the word) family, archetypal immigrants-in-the-making, whose soul cousins dwell in the writing of Christina Garcia, Maxine Hong Kinston, Louise DeSalvo and Joanna Clapps Herman. With surpassing compassion, Catto animates the mothers, fathers, seers, ne’er-do-wells, misanthropes and heroes, whose sincerity and humor bring the lost world of Aunt Pig to spiny, sweet, crackling life." – George Guida, author of New York and Other Love Poems

150 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 30, 2009