After Italy: A Family Memoir of Arranged Marriage

After Italy: A Family Memoir of Arranged Marriage is the story of marriages across three generations of a Calabrian family. Starting from a marriage brokered to facilitate immigration from Southern Italy to Braddock, PA, a steel town outside of Pittsburgh, this memoir explores the multigenerational impact of arranged marriage and takes readers on an unlikely path to international adoption. "This beautifully written story of three generations of marriage is a page-turner. Monardo's honest and reflective memoir reveals intergenerational patterns as intricate as Italian lace. This family story has something to teach us all."—Mary Pipher, A Life in Light and Reviving Ophelia "Monardo crafts a moving, compelling, and gorgeously written memoir that is part cultural exploration and part emotional inventory. After Italy is a kind of translation, taking big questions involving society and self and relating them in the universal language of deeply explored personal experience." —Sue William Silverman, Acetylene Torch Songs and How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences "Monardo's family story is one of strength and vulnerability, the two chambers of the immigrant heart." —Adriana Trigiani, The Good Left Undone "After Italy is a story of desire, disappointment, perseverance and liberation, a reminder that love follows its own path." —Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, Finding Querencia: Essays from In Between "I relished every detail of this family story." —Ann Hood, The Italian Wife and The Stolen Child "A profoundly personal story told with intimate precision and in exquisite emotional detail. Even when love is absent or imperfect or too lightly or tightly held, it's always the main event. Monardo knows this intuitively and has written a beautiful and captivating book."— Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects Of Discussion