Advice for Italian Boys (27 page)
I grew up in a house in which books were read and written, and so for me, the jump into novels from journalism and short stories did not feel like an enormous one. Finishing and then publishing my first novel,
The Sad Truth About Happiness
, felt to me like the next logical step in a writing life. I do think it is an advantage (although not essential) to grow up in a writing house if you want to be a writer, and I compare it sometimes to being the butcher’s child and becoming a butcher yourself in turn. If you grow up around a particular art or business, there isn’t as much mystique in it. You know generally how to go about what needs to be done.
“As I wrote that first book, I kept in mind something that my mother had said, that it had been important to her ‘to write in the most intimate way possible, as if I were whispering into the ear of someone I loved.’”
I began to write
The Sad Truth About Happiness
when my mother, the writer Carol Shields, was already quite ill. She died from complications of breast cancer before it came out, and so I missed the chance to ask her for advice. However, as I wrote that first book, I kept in mind something that my mother had said, that it had been important to her “to write in the most intimate way possible, as if I were whispering into the ear of someone I loved.”
I am starting to turn my attention to a third novel, one with a name that was suggested by my second son and middle child, “Anguish Pie.” Each of these books has a theme.
The Sad Truth About Happiness
is about happiness and unhappiness.
Advice for Italian Boys
is about the advice that family members and friends
give us as we make our way through our lives, advice that can sometimes be as baffling as life itself. “Anguish Pie” will be about death and what I believe happens afterward.
I had other kinds of guidance from my mother, not delivered as counsel or warnings the way that the Italian-Canadian characters in
Advice for Italian Boys
deliver theirs, but instead as the kind of instruction you soak up by watching someone else doing something well, like the butcher’s son watching how his father separates the filet from the sirloin with a sharp knife and a careful hand.
I knew, for example, that my mother always had a structure in her mind before she began to write a book. She referred to this structure as “a very physical image that I can call up, just the way you would call up an image on your screen.” An example is the way that her first novel,
Small Ceremonies
, is organized. It is divided into nine chapters, each representing a month of an academic year—September and on through May. “And in my mind,” she said, “those chapters looked like the cars of a freight train, and I just lined them up, nine of them, and I knew I would have to fill those freight cars, and that was the image, and it helped me keep things together a little bit.”
“I knew, for example, that my mother always had a structure in her mind before she began to write a book.”
I feel the same need for an organizing principle when I set out to write.
The Sad Truth About Happiness
has as its framework the idea that the main character, Maggie Selgrin, is taking a visitor on a tour around the house in which she lives.
Advice for Italian Boys
has a very different shape—I thought of it as a backyard clothesline, with the advice that the characters give to the central character, Nicolo Pavone, a twenty-four-year-old fitness
coach, as the pegs that secure his life to the line.
I have always been interested, as my mother was, in the lives of others. “A human life, and this is the only plot I think I’m interested in, is this primordial plot of birth, love, work, decline and death,” she said. “This is just life working away toward the end of life.” I was the kind of child who liked to stare at other people and try to overhear their conversations and imagine their lives. I suppose I still do this, although now that I am older I try to be a bit less obvious. I look at someone in the queue at the coffee shop and wonder,
Who are you fundamentally? Do you feel as real to yourself as I do? Do you harbour secrets and longings and wishes, or are you entirely contented? What would you blurt out if I caught you in an unguarded moment?
And I often speculate about personal details such as, how does it feel to have the build of a professional wrestler, or to be enormously fat, or to have a yellow braid that you wind up and pin to the top of your head. I absolutely long to ask these questions, but we generally aren’t allowed to bother strangers with this kind of enquiry, and so the next best thing is to put the character in a novel and work it out by fully imagining them for a period of time.
“I was the kind of child who liked to stare at other people and try to overhear their conversations and imagine their lives.”
In
Advice for Italian Boys
, I gave myself the licence to be a young fitness instructor, an Italian grandmother, a law student who has made a mistake with potentially serious consequences, a woman I saw in a coffee lineup who wants to strike out on a life of her own, and many others, none of them like me, all of
them human and interesting, each clamouring for their story to be heard.
I have new goals now that I am working on my next book. I want to use the first-person voice again, and I want to try to follow more closely one of my mother’s principles for writing, which was to write exactly what she intended.
When she was writing poetry in her late twenties, my mother said that she began to want to achieve something different in her writing. “At the end of each poem,” she said, “I asked myself, ‘Is this what I really mean?’ and it was the first time I felt I took myself seriously. I was not thinking of [the] reader.…I think we can never think about that. That’s like thinking about market…I put that question to myself very sternly, and it often resulted in the rewriting of the poem to make sure I said what I really meant. Now this is a piece of wisdom you would think I would have absorbed at once, but in fact, it seems I’m one of these people who has to learn the same thing over and over again. So there have been many times in my writing life where I’ve had to remember that.”
“Why write at all if not to set down exactly what you mean, to come as close to the truth as words will allow?”
This is as good advice about writing as I have ever heard. Why write at all if not to set down exactly what you mean, to come as close to the truth as words will allow?
Reprinted with permission of
The Globe and Mail
Some of Anne Giardini’s Favourite Books
There are so many! Here are a few that come early in an alphabetical list. I haven’t included my mother’s books, each one of which is a favourite. I keep a changing list on my webpage at the Writers’ Union of Canada:
www.writersunion.ca/ww_profile. asp?mem=305&L.
A Room of One’s Own
by Virginia Woolf This powerful essay has been life-changing for me and for many thousands of women.
Black Dogs
by Ian McEwan This book is McEwan’s best—a short, dark novel about how narrative is created.
Black Swan Green
by David Mitchell This book absolutely nails adolescence.
Enduring Love
by Ian McEwan A comic mystery of how little we know and understand each other.
Enigma of Arrival
by V.S. Naipaul This book is about the unfolding of selfdiscovery and seeing the world.
Excellent Women
by Barbara Pym Pym is Jane Austen’s truest successor, and this is the best of her slim, razor-sharp novels.
Gilead
by Marilynne Robinson A novel of visions, conflict and love.
The Girls of Slender Means
by Muriel Spark A flawless and macabre book about young women in London in 1945.
Guns, Germs, and Steel
by Jared Diamond This non-fiction book changed my understanding of the damage we do to each other and to the world.
Middlemarch
by George Eliot Enormous, wonderfully and confidently written.
and…
Any and all of Alice Munro’s stories These stories are always about two things: the way people actually live their lives, and the other, possible lives that they glimpse but almost never attain.
Here are a few of Anne Giardini’s top website picks.
www.carolshieldslabyrinth.ca
This website is about the real and wonderful Carol Shields Memorial Labyrinth in Winnipeg.
www.carolshieldslabyrinth.com
This interactive labyrinth is a virtual walk through Carol Shields’s life and work.
www.freerice.com/index.php
Online quizzes test your vocabulary and knowledge of languages, art, chemistry, geography and mathematics. For every correct answer, the site sponsors donate rice through the UN World Food Program.
To receive updates on author events and new books by Anne Giardini, sign up today at
www.authortracker.ca
www.writersfest.bc.ca
The Vancouver International Writers & Readers Festival is one of North America’s most important literary events. This site includes “Literary Links” that are useful for readers and writers across Canada.
www.writersunion.ca
The Writers’ Union of Canada is a not-for-profit organization that supports and advocates for Canada’s authors and Canadian writing.
Thank you to my adopted Italian family and in particular to Gilda, Josephine and Maria for their stories and
proverbi
; to Pietro Calendino for assistance with the Calabrese dialect; to the men in my life, including Don, Tony, John, Joseph, Nicholas, Sandy, Paul, Alex, Patrick and Lawrence, for helping me consider the world from a different perspective; to Sofia for her sense of humour; to Allyson Latta for her excellent copy edit; and to Jennifer Lambert and Noelle Zitzer at HarperCollins, for their thoughtful work on this book. Any errors are mine alone.
The Sad Truth About Happiness
Advice for Italian Boys
Copyright © 2009 by Anne Giardini
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EPub Edition © JULY 2010 ISBN: 978-1-554-68953-8
Published by Harper Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Giardini, Anne
Advice for Italian boys : a novel / Anne Giardini.
I. Title.
PS8613.I27A64 2009a C813’.6 C2009-905763-8
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