Night after night, we feasted. On Christmas Eve, we ate the traditional seven fishes at Zio Ernesto’s and played cards and tombola late into the night; for Christmas Day we headed down the street to visit Zio Totò, the greatest of the joke-tellers; we stopped into Zia Clara’s for her famous pizza sfogliata, rivaled only by Zia Carolina’s crespelle; in the middle of the day we found ourselves dancing across Zia Maddalena’s concrete basement floor; and on Saint Stephen’s Day we gathered at the home of Zio Nello, the oldest and the keeper of the family history. We were never alone. At meals, on car rides, on walks up and down the village street, my aunts and uncles surrounded us. They seemed to have one hand on my mother at all times, on her shoulder or her lap or the small of her back, as if to keep her from leaving them again.
This month of feasts did show me who we were, both as a family and as a people: we loved each other with abandon. Of all the ways of expressing love that Italians have in their repertoire, the feast, with food and stories at its center, is among the most powerful. Knowing this, seeing it up close, made me less afraid of the future. No matter what, I thought, I was rich in love and would never be poor.
Within a year of that trip to Sant’Elpidio, Zia Maddalena and Zia Clara both passed away, and my mother vowed never to go back to Italy. She couldn’t bear the country without them, she told me, and so she turned her back on it completely. All This Talk of Love is about a woman much like her, someone who was born into the riches of family and then renounces it. I named her Maddalena and gave her two lives: the one she left behind in the village and the one she built with her husband and children in the United States. What would happen, I wondered, if the two lives collided?
Questions for Discussion
1. In what ways does Tony’s absence continue to affect each character’s perspective and the way the characters see their role and future?
2. One reviewer called the Grasso family codependent. We generally think that codependency occurs when one person is addicted, physically or psychologically, while the other person is psychologically dependent on the first. Does this sound like any of the Grassos to you? If so, how?
3. Maddalena, Antonio, and Prima each give their own definitions of love as it relates to their hearts, minds, and souls (see pages 156, 167, 255, 256, 324). How do these definitions reflect on them? Maddalena tells Frankie (page 255), “When we romance, we do it with our hearts, but we love our husbands and wives with our brains; our children and our parents we love with our souls. You have to keep them all separate . . . or you get in trouble, mixing one kind of love up with another.” What does she mean?
4. Why do you think Prima is so obsessed with Allison Grey? What in Prima’s past might affect her reaction to Allison?
5. What keeps Frankie with Rhonda for most of the novel? Do you think he’s better off with Kelly Anne? Why do you think Frankie ultimately chooses to settle down with her?
6. How does Prima’s accident change her?
7. At the end of Frankie and Ryan’s party, Maddalena says, “That’s all we get? One little song?” (page 292). How might this be a theme for the entire novel?
8. What do you think the epigraph refers to? Do you think it applies more to one character or to all the characters equally?
9. What does Italy represent to each of the characters, and how does that change by the end of the novel?
10. What about this particular immigrant family is similar to other immigrant families you’ve read about? What is different?
WOWE
Christopher Castellani is the author of two previous novels: A Kiss from Maddalena, which won the Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction, and The Saint of Lost Things. He lives in Boston, where he is the artistic director of Grub Street.
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© 2013 by Christopher Castellani.
All rights reserved.
Edna St. Vincent Millay, excerpts from “Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly;” from Collected Poems. Copyright 1931, © 1958 by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Norma Millay Ellis. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Holly Peppe, Literary Executor, The Millay Society, www.millay.org.
“How Some of It Happened,” © 1998 by Marie Howe from her collection What the Living Do, published by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
ISBN 978-1-61620-190-6
All This Talk of Love Page 30
