What do these two books have in common?

Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds

Will is so sad that he's skipped over being sad and went right to anger. He knows the rules. Don't cry, don't snitch, and get even.

Will's brother Shawn was shot coming home from an errand for their mom. Will wants revenge and he's pretty sure he knows who did it.

In this novel in verse, Jason Reynolds introduces us to Will as he boards the elevator to get to the ground floor of his building. He has seven floors between his apartment and the street where he plans to shoot the boy he thinks shot his brother. And on the way down he grapples with the choice.

Will is alone in the elevator... or is he?

Jason Reynolds wrote this book inspired by A Christmas Carol. If you're familiar with that story, then you already have a hint, but I don't want to give away too much! Part of the wow factor of this book is the surprises you find. 

This book has so much to think about, even if you're not a teenager. It will take you less than an afternoon to read. Read it!

Between a hoax and a scam

This isn't a book review but it's kind of about a book... 

Since the shut-down, my boyfriend has been watching a lot of Law and Order in the background while he's been working from home. When school ended I started joining him and we laugh together about some of the weird dialogue. They couldn't just say two people were having an affair; they were "sweating up the sheets." We have fun spotting character actors and I Google where we might know them from. It helps that WE TV is showing nothing but Law and Order, all day every day. We joke that I have to leave the house on the hour to go for a hike or to go to the store because if not I'll get sucked into another ripped-from-the-headlines plot.

Yesterday, Matt texted me and said, "Remind me to tell you about the most ridiculous Law and Order plot yet when I get home." Look, as someone who likes to write and still has aspirations to publish a novel, I know it's not nice to pick on other people's writing. I've also just taken two levels of a sitcom pilot writing class, and this stuff is way harder than it looks. So if the plots of Law and Order episodes are little far-fetched it's fine. I still couldn't wait to hear about it.

Matt had just watched an episode called Faith about a publisher who was murdered because he caught onto the fact that the teenage author with ALS whose memoir he was publishing might not have been real. I said, "Oh my God, Matt. This isn't crazy. I knew this person! This is a real story!"

So I'm going to take you all back to 1995. We were early adopters of the Internet in our house, at least among people I knew. We were faithful AOL users. I liked to hang out in the teen rooms and I remember specifically spending time in chat rooms and message boards for teenagers who liked to write. I started chatting with a guy whose screen name was TONE123 (at the time I was SybilVane, named after a character in The Picture of Dorian Gray.) TONE123 told me that his name was Tony and that he was my age (about 16) and he was a published author. For real, a kid my age had published a book. I was fascinated. He'd written an entire book, found himself an agent, and had the thing published. It was a book I could go to Waldenbooks and buy. It was called A Rock and a Hard Place, and I did indeed go to Waldenbooks and buy it. It was a harrowing memoir of the child abuse he suffered at the hands of his biological parents. The story was that his parents used to physically and sexually abuse him and allow their friends to do it too; in fact, that's why he was also suffering from AIDS. It was horrifying. It was the saddest thing I'd ever read. And it was all a true story. I knew this guy. His full name was Anthony Godby Johnson, and we were IM friends. 

We used to email each other stories back and forth and give each other feedback. I chatted on the phone with him once. He supposedly lived in New York City and I was in northern NJ. Once, some TV developer he knew was putting together a focus group of teenagers and my dad drove me and my sister into NY to learn more about the variety show they were brainstorming. Tony was friends with Oprah, Mr. Rogers, Keith Olbermann, and Armistead Maupin. And me, apparently. And I'm sure lots of others. This was before the days of Skype and Facetime. There was no video chatting. There was email and there was the phone, and catfishing was easy.

Somewhere around when went to college, we lost touch. My dorm wasn't outfitted with the ability to connect to AOL. I could use email from campus but not IMs or anything. We did email once in a while but his responses were far apart and finally we just... I guess lost touch. 

I hadn't thought about Tony in a long time, but several years later my dad asked my sisters and me at Christmas to go through some boxes of things from our house in NJ and take whatever we wanted; the rest was getting tossed or donated. In my pile of books was A Rock and a Hard Place, all highlighted and underlined. By then, Google was a thing and I was wondering what was going on with Tony. Was he even still alive? Had he written anything else? Google turned up a bunch of links instead about the fact that there never was an Anthony Godby Johnson. I found this article by Tad Friend in The New Yorker. I also learned about Armistead Maupin's novel The Night Listener, which was made into a movie by the same name. 

There's something about finding out that something you just took to be true having been a total fabrication. It kind of shifts the ground under your feet for a second. Tony was a completely made-up person, fabricated by a woman named Vicki Fraginals, who claimed to be his adoptive mother. Nobody had ever met him face-to-face. He wasn't allowed to meet anyone because he was soooo sick, but Vicki had fooled a literary agent and a publisher enough to get his memoir published and distributed. That added legitimacy to it, so none of the celebrities (at least at first) questioned anything. Internet and publishing hoaxes now are much more common, from James Frey's A Million Little Pieces to Catfish. 

I went down a little rabbit hole last night, watching a youtube video of Keith Olbermann talking to Armistead Maupin about the fact that they'd both been tricked by Vicki. Keith is angry. Armistead seems to have dealt with it. 

I think it's time I read and watch The Night Listener. I was only a small blip on Vicki's radar, I'm sure. I wasn't rich or famous. I had nothing to offer her as far as fame or publicity. It's kind of creepy that she hung out pretending to be him in AOL chat rooms. She was clearly a pretty disturbed person. There is going to be a short film released soon called Tony Fraginals made about Tony Johnson by another teenage friend of his. I couldn't resist sending him an email about Tony. I haven't heard back yet but I can't wait to watch the film. 

Like juicy gossip over pasta...

Lately I've put my finger on one of the things that makes me fall completely in love with a book. A narrator can make or break a story, and I love the kind that makes it feel like the narrator is actually telling you the story. You're somehow a part of it all, even though you're just the reader. This is one of those books. As soon as you open it up, you feel like the narrator (whose identity you find out much, much later) is pressing you down into a comfy chair and handing you a plate of pasta and meatballs, saying, "Sit. Eat. I have a juicy story to tell you and you're going to need that spaghetti and wine." The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna is an utterly gorgeously written novel. It's one of those books that aspiring novelists (like me...) read and think, "How did she do this?" You do feel a little like your favorite brutally honest grandma is laying it all out for you.

Picture it: Sicily, 1922.

Stella is born in the village of Ievoli in 1920. Over the course of her life, she has a lot of brushes with death. The family story is that even though her name roughly translates to "lucky star," she's cursed by the ghost of the older sister who died before she was born. Maybe, maybe not? 

Throughout the story you meet her entire family, including the generation before her, and learn how hard survival was in Italy for a family at that time. In her late teens, they immigrate to Hartford, CT, and life goes on. I really don't want to say much more because I don't want to spoil anything that happens. But trust me, it's juicy. It's twisty and turny. And there is just enough nudging and winking by the story teller to keep you going, "And then what? And then what?" I need to talk to Juliet Grames and find out if there is even more to this story, based loosely on her own grandmother. I actually cried at the end of this book, and I don't really cry at books. 

Content warnings for some scenes of violence against women and children. They're short scenes, but two come pretty close together about 2/3 of the way in and I had to actually walk away from the book for a couple of days to process that.

My great-great-great-granparents, Clemente Serafini and Giuseppa (Pizzutti) Serafini.

Reading this made me think of my own family of immigrants. My mother was half Italian; her mother's family was from Italy (but from Frosinone, not Calabria). They arrived in the USA and settled in Leominster, Massachusetts in 1905 (the Lanzas) and 1921 (the Roccas, by way of France). Mary Lanza was born in 1905, just a few months after her parents arrived, and was the first of eight children. Renaldo Rocca was a young adult when he arrived. Family lore is that Mary and Renaldo were an arranged marriage. Their daughter Josephine (my grandmother) told me that their families knew each other from "the old country." Reading this book made me think a lot about them, and I wished I could talk to my great-grandmother about it. I'm sure she had stories from her parents about Italy. I was lucky enough to have her in my life until I was 22 and she was 95. We did make ravioli together and she was the kindest, sweetest, tiniest and possibly my most Catholic relative (although there is some competition on Dad's side for that title). 

   

Left to right: Mary (Lanza) Rocca; her parents Giovanni Lanza and Giulia (Serafini) Lanza

I have a cousin (who is actually my mother's first cousin if we're being technical) who based an entire TV show around Mary and her ravioli. 

And now Mary, Josephine, and my mother Janet are all gone. The Italian blood has been diluted by my grandfather's English/Irish and my dad's Eastern European. Still, 23 and Me and Ancestery.com confirm that I have it! Reading this book during quarantine inspired me to start studying Italian in earnest. Someday we'll be able to travel again, and I've only seen a small portion of Italy. I really want to go to Alvito, the villiage in Frosinone where my great-greats and great-great-greats came from. I feel like in order to really do it right, I need to have a basic mastery of Italian. I want to correspond with someone over there who knows how to find records and find out where my relatives actually lived. I want to be able to speak Italian with people who might be my distant cousins. I've already heard from someone on Instagram who saw (Mary's mother) Giulia's photo and said that he has her maiden name as his last name and he believes he has her mouth. His name is Mario. 

We went to Venice and had a day trip to Trieste in 2016. We first were in Hungary and Austria, and when we got to Venice after a bus, a train and a boat and then a vaporetto, we had to haul our luggage up two flights of stairs. We checked into the hotel and then found a place to have dinner and I had a chance to finally just sit and look around and take it in. My boyfriend asked why I was crying. I said, "Because I'm in Italy." My mom never made it to Italy. My grandmother told me many times that she wanted to see it. And there I was, about to order a plate of spaghetti on a palazzo. For a few days I lived almost entirely on spaghetti, gelato, and white wine, and somehow my pants still fit by the end of the trip. I can't wait to go back.  

Anna Josephine (Rocca) Gould; Janet (Gould) Lewin

This entry is kind of all over the place, which I recognize. This book brought up a lot, I guess! I'm not a big re-reader but this is one I will re-read. I promise you'll love it, or I'll take you out for pasta. Even if you do love it (WHEN you do love it) I'll still take you out for pasta. I want to talk about Stella with someone else who's gotten to know her. 

For another book about someone who's almost died again and again, I highly recommend the memoir I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O'Farrell. For a book with a similar vibe, try My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. (I need to read the rest of that series.)