Author Anna Monardo fulfills grandmother's dying wish with After Italy

The genesis of Anna Monardo’s new autobiography was seeded almost three decades ago when her grandmother, clinging to life, relayed a final request.

“I want to write the story of my life,” Gramma Stella told her granddaughter.

“When she said that she was dying, and she knew she was dying,” Monardo tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “And she was very young — she was dying too young. She was only 66, and during those last months, you could tell she was sort of thinking over her life and some rough breaks, and that things really could have gone differently and that she wished they had.”

Monardo, a novelist and writing professor who currently teaches at the University of Nebraska Omaha, grew up in Braddock and Forest Hills. She was always aware of the unspoken prohibition against Italian families writing about “private stuff.”

Even now, after years of research, writing, and the recent publication of After Italy: A Family Memoir of Arranged Marriage (Bordighera Press), Monardo isn’t entirely certain she made the right decision.

“But obviously, there's a larger part of me that thinks not only was it okay, but necessary,” says Monardo, who appears on Thu., May 23 as a guest of the Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures Made Local series.

Monardo’s autobiography is simultaneously a celebration of an immigrant Italian family and the story of a woman trying to forge an identity beyond familial restrictions placed on her. Determined to enter the arts, Monardo went against her father’s wish that she become a lawyer. He told Monardo she wasn’t permitted to date until the age of 25.

The centerpiece of After Italy is the chapter “Easter.” During the spring of 1992, Monardo was visiting her parents in Florida when she learned that her father married her mother to attain U.S. citizenship and was promised a car as part of a dowry.

Monardo, then in her mid-30s, was shocked by the revelation. She had thought that, early in their marriage, her parents had lived apart while her father tried to establish his career as a doctor.

“To find out at the heart of it was discord between my father and his father-in-law about the dowry, that was really hard to wrap my mind around,” Monardo says. “As a kid, I had a hard time with arranged marriage. That was not a paradigm for anyone growing up in suburban Forest Hills.

“And then, dowry? I’ve come to understand dowry differently, I’ve done a lot of reading about it in different cultures. But to hear how that played out between my parents and grandparents, and our family, that was upsetting.”

The specter of arranged marriage impacted Monardo, as both her mother and maternal grandmother had spouses chosen for them. She watched the sometimes-contentious interactions between family members and often felt her romantic relationships were haunted by that family history.

“We believed in marriage, obviously, and we worked hard at it, and we just can’t get it right,” Monardo says. “Is it some evil-eye curse? And then I read about epigenetics (the study of how behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way genes work) and thought, okay, is this an inherited trauma? I just tried to explore it from every angle, because it affected me.”

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Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures Made Local series presents Anna Monardo. 6 p.m. Thu., May 23. Carnegie Library Lecture Hall. 4440 Forbes Ave., Oakland. Free. Registration required. pittsburghlectures.org