This irreverent book—part autobiography, part poetry, part prose sketches—defies scholarly boundaries with its both/and thinking and its audacious disregard of borders. Perhaps “irreverent” is redundant here, as we learn that we deal with an adventure-seeking, eternally curious, motorcycle-loving licensed pilot, and fond practitioner of arm wrestling. But Lanzillotto's writing also opens up to vulnerability in its honest look at the reality the author inhabits.
Lanzillotto walks us through a trip to Italy after the loss of her mother. She has her readers start a few months earlier, in her apartment in Westchester, and then brings them back there at the end—a Westchester that feels then charged with new meanings and, possibly, a new intention. Along the way, she explores the themes of identity, bonds, loss, loneliness, and the intergenerational legacy of despair. The focus shifts swiftly between the imaginative reading of the most minute everyday acts and objects (we hear...
