KINGSTON, R.I. — March 30, 1999 — It takes a writer like Mary Cappello of Providence, an associate professor of English at 溏心vlog免费B站, to show that life is full of contradictions, but they grow from the same roots. She reveals just that in her powerful memoir Night Bloom, published this past fall by Beacon Press.
For example, the Night-Blooming Cereus, a plant that figures in her family鈥檚 story and only blossoms after sunset. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a witchy, bewitching, hideous monstrosity of a plant,鈥� Cappello says in her memoir 鈥渨hose flower is magnificent.鈥�
Cappello, a second-generation Italian-American, finds beauty growing with the ugly: Her father, between fits of rage, tended the most delicate garden in their working-class Philadelphia suburb. Her mother, an agoraphobic whose fears kept her from leaving the house for seven years, spoke out against racism, wrote feminist sermons for a progressive parish priest, and recited fiery poetry at the dinner table. Her aunt mourned her young daughter鈥檚 death by crafting thousands of rosary beads.
Night Bloom is Cappello鈥檚 complex look at her family and consequently at herself. Deftly interweaving the bilingual journals of her grandfather (a Southern Italian shoemaker), her mother鈥檚 poetry, and Sicilian folklore, she recounts growing up in a neighborhood 鈥渨here nothing was meant to bloom.鈥�
The book is a memoir of a family. 鈥淎t its best, my memoir is a memoir of class, class mobility, and the violence created by class distinction,鈥� says the author.
Cappello sees the lines between fiction and memoir as very thin. Memoir is a fiction, she says, but with a very specific theme鈥攎emory itself. The memoir is a story about memory.
Cappello says she reads others鈥� memoirs because she longs to know how they have marshaled the resources at their disposal to reinvent the relationship between the past and present.
A poet and author of scholarly essays, Cappello found her decision to work with the memoir form had to do with her being a lesbian and the acute realization of the oppressive uses (for both gays and straights) to which sexual definitions are put in modern culture. 鈥淚f any memoir needs to resist the confessional mode it is the queer memoir, for the discourse of sexuality and the confessional work hand in hand in our culture,鈥� she cautions.
Cappello鈥檚 book is attracting a lot of well-deserved attention. It鈥檚 been reviewed in numerous publications, including Women鈥檚 Review of Books. Cappello was interviewed by Canadian Public Radio and was invited to be the D.B. Shaw lecturer at Dickinson College this April. She also has been invited to participate in the Deep South Writers conference this fall. Cappello has been nominated by an editor at W. W. Norton to be a fellow at the prestigious Breadloaf Writer鈥檚 Conference, held each summer at Middlebury College.
Cappello鈥檚 mother implored her daughter to look with the same kind of convictions most Italian mothers tell their children to mangia! (eat!). 鈥淲inter has its colorful berries, too, she would show me. Appreciate. Love. Live. Remember. Remember what you see and it will be a life in you, a flame turned to low, and it could be a bounty you give to others.鈥�
Fortunately for the reader, Cappello has followed her mother鈥檚 advice in NightBloom.
For More Information: Jan Sawyer, 874-2116
