Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
122. Retrieving Our Past- with Marianna Torgovnick
62 Plays3 years ago
Marianna Torgovnick writes on the novel and novel theory, film, postcolonialism, modernism, and the twentieth century more generally, and especially on contemporary American culture. Her work is broadly interdisciplinary and has been taught in Art History, Anthropology, and Religion courses as well as English, Literature, and Theory. She has published Closure in the Novel (Princeton, 1981), and The Visual Arts, Pictorialism, and the Novel: James, Lawrence, and Woolf (Princeton, 1985), Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago, 1990), and Crossing Ocean Parkway (Chicago, 1994), for which she won an American Book Award, and Primitive Passions: Men, Women, and the Quest for Ecstasy (Knopf, 1997; paperback Chicago, 1998) and The War Complex: World War II in Our Time , about memories and perceptions of the Second War World in the Twenty First Century. She has also written series of articles for general interest publications. Professor Torgovnick currently directs The Duke in New York Arts and Media Program, taught in New York. She returns to teach America Dreams American Movies to a large enrollment each year.
https://www.mariannatorgovnick.com/
https://www.griefgratitudeandthegrayinbetween.com
Recommended
Transcript
Coping with Painful Memories
00:00:00
Speaker
I don't know if memory is ever completely without pain, but you want to arrive at the point where you can retrieve parts of your past without it being a lacerating thing. And the reading of the classics and the meditating and the yoga, those were all mechanisms which allowed me to access memory without it being painful, without it being a source of power for me.
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:27
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Grief, Gratitude, and the Gray in Between podcast. This podcast is about exploring the grief that occurs at different times in our lives in which we have had major changes and transitions that literally shake us to the core and make us experience grief.
00:00:50
Speaker
I created this podcast for people to feel a little less hopeless and alone in their own grief process as they hear the stories of others who have had similar journeys.
Meet Mariana Torgovnik
00:01:02
Speaker
I'm Kendra Rinaldi, your host. Now, let's dive right in to today's episode. Today we have Mariana Torgovnik.
00:01:16
Speaker
Mariana's so happy to have you. Mariana is an author, and we will be talking about many different things. She's written two different books, Mariana, is that correct? No, I've actually written about seven books. Oh, seven books. Today we're talking in particular about two. Memoirs. Which are memoirs, but you've written seven, so you are definitely a really big author. Well, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me.
00:01:45
Speaker
I am so happy you're here. So tell us, where do you live? Where are you right now? Right now, I am in Greenwich Village in Manhattan, in New York City. You're in the city. Okay. I live here for part of the year. It's unusual to be here in the summer, but here I am. And the other place I live is Durham, North Carolina, where Duke University is, because I'm a professor at Duke.
Growing Up Italian-American
00:02:10
Speaker
Okay, so in in the summers you're in usually in the city and Sometimes yeah, I just finished directing a summer program here called Duke in New York Arts and Media So I was here for for that and then my daughter has a birthday next week. So I stayed in order to attend to a birthday party and Then I'll head back to Durham after that. So are you a New Yorker? I am a New Yorker. I was born in Brooklyn and
00:02:37
Speaker
I'm raised in Brooklyn. My first memoir is about growing up in Bensonhurst, which is a somewhat notorious community in Brooklyn, and growing up Italian-American.
00:02:48
Speaker
We left out my middle name, which is DiMarco, which identifies the Italian part of me. And I sometimes wonder, Mariana DiMarco is such a good name. Yes. Why I switched to Mariana to her government, although I guess I know. So I'm Kendra Rinaldi. So Rinaldi is not my Mary. I never changed my name, Rinaldi, which is also Italian. So I never changed my name to Mary's name. So I kept my name. Well, that would have made sense.
Cultural Disjunctions and Experiences
00:03:17
Speaker
You could always, you could always have the artistic name be whatever you wanted to be. You know, you could be just, you know, like Prince had just a symbol, right? So you can always be whatever you want, be whatever you want to be named. So Mariana, so you then wrote then this first memoir. So tell us about that memoir, the first one. And then what is it called? The first one is called Crossing Ocean Parkway. And
00:03:46
Speaker
It had a subtitle, which I removed from the second edition. What was it? Readings by an Italian American daughter. And it was a collection of essays about growing up Italian American in Brooklyn. In the era when I did, I would guess I'm
00:04:04
Speaker
Maybe. I would guess. I love it. I love it. Oh, I thought you were going to say you were going to guess your age. I'm like, I would guess I'm. No, I was growing up at a period when Bensonhurst, the neighborhood where I was born, was largely Italian-American. There are always rumors of mafia connections, which did not exist.
00:04:26
Speaker
except on one particular street, which still has mafia connections, called 18th Avenue. But not where I was growing up, I was distinctly working class. So I was a working class Italian-American girl, and in those days, working class Italian-American girls were not expected to go to college.
00:04:44
Speaker
really, really, really wanted to go to college and my parents really, really wanted me to be a typist. So there was a little bit of a conflict and a little bit of drama there. Oh, so they wanted you to have was a trade and not go to college, like be a typist instead of a group? Inceivable to them because of the working class origins and the Southern Italian
00:05:05
Speaker
one generation-ness of the family, so it was inconceivable to them. And I really wanted college. So the first four essays in that book are about being this Italian-American kid from Bensonhurst and having these ambitions, and they're not being nurtured by my culture.
Impact of Racial Events
00:05:23
Speaker
And how I navigated that, I kind of counterpoint
00:05:29
Speaker
My experience is with a racial murder that took place in Bensonhurst in 1989 when a young man named Yousef Hawkins was walking through the neighborhood to find a used car and he was mistaken for somebody who was dating an Italian-American girl in the neighborhood and was shot.
00:05:48
Speaker
And this was a celebrated incident in New York. There were demonstrations by Italian Americans. There was a trial and the Italian young men, as far as I know, were convicted.
College Experiences and Cultural Differences
00:06:01
Speaker
But it was a celebrated instance and it occurred when my parents were visiting me in Durham, North Carolina. So, okay, Italian American working class girl and I find myself teaching first at Williams College, which is a very wispy. I just visited there last week and I didn't see a single black person, which was even still so up to now it's still that way.
00:06:23
Speaker
even still, it was really very, I mean, I've had a black colleague used to say, the buildings are white, the people are white, the snow is white. You know, it still seemed very much like that. And then when I left Williams, I went to Duke, which is a more diverse university, but at the time I joined it, not so very diverse, it's become very diverse since.
Critical Readings and Cultural Reflections
00:06:45
Speaker
Anyway, so it's about the cultural disjunction between those two things. And for me, the bridge was marriage to
00:06:52
Speaker
I took off neck a Jewish-American who lived on the other side of Cross the Ocean Parkway, hence Cross the Ocean Parkway. And then the second half of that book is critical readings of the godfather, the Mario Puzo novel, Camille Palia, the Italian-American critic, the use of the cultural we, which is a voice that cultural critics use a lot. And then as I was finishing that book, my father died.
00:07:19
Speaker
And so I included an essay about my father's death. He died of lung cancer. And it kind of rounded it off. And I was quite young then. I was in my
Book Impact and Community Reactions
00:07:29
Speaker
30s when I wrote that book. It seems rather audacious to write a memoir, but it did very well. And I heard from a lot of people and still do. It spoke very strongly to gay people, to Southern men. Yeah, it spoke to a lot of people, and I would get letters from them.
00:07:49
Speaker
I love what you're saying, because the fact that even though you're telling your story as an Italian-American growing up in New York, how are stories, like you said, can find common ground with someone else that's also living this diversity? And I'm sure with your then marrying also, then your husband growing up, then
00:08:10
Speaker
Jewish community, he could even relate to things that you had also experienced. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Jewish culture is somewhat notoriously in favor of higher education. So, you know, it was a kind of a medium for me to enter into a sphere where my intelligence, my skills. Was it mine?
00:08:39
Speaker
The only negative mail I received about this book was from Italian American men.
00:08:46
Speaker
who totally misunderstood and thought that I resented being Italian, which I don't, or that I felt that I had been abused as a child, which I wasn't. I just felt that I was in a milieu where it was harder to achieve my ambitions. My parents were very loving. I realized later that, in fact, I would not have gotten to go to college if they were authentically
Cultural Pressures and Evolutions
00:09:10
Speaker
opposed. They just didn't know what it meant.
00:09:12
Speaker
Um, and so it took a long time to negotiate it. In fact, when I, you know, an academic tenure is right. When you get that tenure, when I called my parents and told them I had tenure, they said, Oh, 10 years. That's wonderful. And it was just, it was, it was a realm that was not, you know, it just wasn't in their cosmography that, you know,
00:09:37
Speaker
What you're talking about, the aspect of when we are being something like in this case of what your parents maybe thought you'd be, the expectations they thought or had of who their daughter or children. You had more than, it was more than you.
00:09:57
Speaker
of what their children are going to be and their expectations based on their own upbringing, like you're saying, you weren't judging them, right? But it was also these expectations of if you're going to be a mother, then what kind of job are you gonna have so that you can be a mother, a wife, because these are the expectations they had created, right? So their projection of your life was based on
00:10:23
Speaker
their own life, correct? Italian American culture has changed a lot. And as mainstream to a very large extent over the last 10 years.
Family Dynamics and Personal Loss
00:10:34
Speaker
But if you think back even to, what was her name? Was it Geraldine Ferraro who ran for president, vice president way back when he was dogged by rumors of mafia affiliations and other things that
00:10:48
Speaker
very much stereotyping, Mario Cuomo, Andrew Cuomo's father, same thing. So Italian Americans have come a very long way over the last decade. But it was especially Italian Americans who stayed in the neighborhoods to which they immigrated. They were very afraid of having their children leave those neighborhoods. And when Italian Americans did leave southern Brooklyn,
00:11:13
Speaker
as they eventually did, now largely a Chinese American community, which is an interesting replacement in and of itself. But they moved en masse to Staten Island, which is the only part of New York City, which is pretty solidly Republican and politically conservative rather than politically liberal. So there's a kind of a cohesiveness to the culture, and I wasn't part of that cohesiveness. Okay, well, thank you for sharing that kind of clarification.
00:11:43
Speaker
Now, let's go back into your family dynamics then. You got an education then, you became a professor, you get married to somebody from the other side of the track, as they say.
00:11:58
Speaker
Right. That's right. Yeah, absolutely. How then were all these things and the family dynamics tell us what they look like after you started making all these different milestones and decisions in your life and the family dynamics between you and your parents and your sibling and your brother? Oh, okay. Wow. That's a lot. I think it differs for each person. My father was the parent I most associated with New York City.
00:12:28
Speaker
I thought it was a very glorious profession, but it actually wasn't. He was a bank messenger, which means he carried things between bank branches. But I associated him with the city and he prided himself on the knowledge of the city and he took me places. So I always associated him with that. My mother was a garment worker. She was a good mother, very good cook, famously good cook.
00:12:50
Speaker
But she had been, Mrs. Odd, she was born in America and then sent back to Calabria in Italy, where she lived until she was 16. Now, Calabria is still a very poor and very peasanty kind of place, so.
00:13:06
Speaker
That's her story. And she was not a sentimental lady, I would say, but a good mother, a loving mother. My brother was a solid, I don't know what political demographic your audience consists of. My brother was a solid Republican and I went to NYU in Columbia and I was not. So we gradually grew apart. My brother and I just had different
00:13:30
Speaker
different backgrounds, different tastes. I mean, I was living in New York and North Carolina and in university, Milios. And he was in suburban New Jersey. He drank, he smoked. And shortly after my mother died, he got pancreatic cancer, which is not a great form of cancer at all. That's what my mom passed away from, so I can understand it. Yeah, I still don't know why it's become so common. And he was
00:13:59
Speaker
We had assumed a certain amount of longevity in the family because there had been extreme longevity on my mother's side of the family. And, you know, obviously pancreatic cancer, it's a tough one. And he chose, like many people, including a friend who's entering less stages of that now, he's just chose to kind of do the chemo all the way until it became actually too late to go to a hospice. And it was hard for me because
00:14:25
Speaker
Especially after my mother died, I realized all the many things you don't say to people when they're still alive. And I really wanted to talk to him and he was kind of determined not to talk. He was on his third marriage. I liked his third wife very much, but the two of them were just, when I would fly up to see him, they just didn't want to talk about it. He was in the hospital, he was getting, came up, nothing was happening.
00:14:51
Speaker
nothing was happening we were just to talk as though we were in their living room and for me that was that was difficult and hard so um this book crossing back was essentially about the difficulty of trying to mourn when it seemed to me these were ordinary losses my mother was in her nineties
00:15:09
Speaker
you know, an ordinary time to die. My brother, we hadn't been that close. So exactly why was I having such a hard time with the grieving process? And so it took me a long time to figure that out. There were a couple of reasons. One was that I'm temperamentally somebody who doesn't like to be in a position which seems vulnerable. And being in grief is a vulnerable state.
00:15:34
Speaker
that is reinforced by a culture, Italian-American culture, which is strongly invested in, you know, looking good for other people. And, you know, when people are dying in your family. Put on your knickers, be a big girl. Yeah, you know, you gotta eat bada, gotta show good face to the world.
00:15:52
Speaker
And then the final thing in this, this is the one which I think was no, there was actually two more things. One was that I as a literary critic, I had been writing about World War Two. A lot of people die in World War Two. And it was hard to not think about everything that had happened, you know,
00:16:09
Speaker
9-11, the COVID crisis. It was hard to think about all the death in the world and to be invested in personal losses. It seemed to me somehow small-minded of it. OK. So comparative grief. Comparative grief. Comparative grief. Comparative grief. The final thing, and I think in many ways the biggest, is that many years before, I had lost a child in infancy. He died at three months old. And I had never really grieved that one properly. And when my daughters were born,
00:16:38
Speaker
And you know, I moved on. It wouldn't have occurred to me to continue to mourn the death of a child, but of course you do.
Acknowledging and Accepting Grief
00:16:45
Speaker
And that was complicating the mourning process for my mother and my brother. It was very strange. And anyway, it took me a long time to unpack that. I did it by means that I describe in the book. So it's not a how-to book. It's not a self-help book, but it does have some lessons in it.
00:17:02
Speaker
Thank you for sharing all of those different reasons of why it was that you really did have difficulty in really expressing
00:17:11
Speaker
your grief or mourning, like you said, because grief just is like something that occurs and mourning is something we do actively towards. Yes. First of all, you have to accept your grief. Right. And know that that's what it is. You think you don't have a choice. You think you have a choice, but of course you don't. What I did, and I talk about this in the book, I was moving like a lunatic. I moved three times in New York City and once in North Carolina.
00:17:38
Speaker
Well, boy, when you move, you keep really busy. What was that about? Obviously, it was a way of just not facing things. Distraction. Yeah, the non-coping kind of ways of doing, which are still coping, just in maybe not the ways in which you would have chosen to. Yeah, yes. Just like how people may
00:18:00
Speaker
seek with alcohol or other things to deal with their pain, it's still a way of coping, just maybe not the way in which we'll be more successful way of dealing with that beat. So, when you then had the
00:18:18
Speaker
death then of your brother. So it was your mother, then your brother, and all of a sudden you have to unpack then this grief that of your child, which had occurred how many years before? You're a three month old.
Healing Through Literature and Meditation
00:18:34
Speaker
Oh wow. A lot of years. A lot, a lot of years is 25 years. It's not uncommon of how you say, cause then you became a mom, you know, then after with your daughters, then you were busy, you were working, you're kind of going through motions that maybe just the time of really being able to
00:18:54
Speaker
sit with those emotions and kind of figure out how to be was just not there. Had your other daughters been born already when you're... No, no, no. So he was your first child? Okay. Yeah, yeah. It was a boy? A boy. He was your first child. So... And that's important too, because I subsequently had girls, which was fine with me. I had a colleague when I was pregnant with my second daughter who said, oh, you must want a boy.
00:19:25
Speaker
You have no idea how stupid that sounds and how wrong that sounds. I didn't say that, but I thought. You just want a healthy child at that point. Yeah. A lot of times, yeah, because we have so much in the aspect of the genders and this and that, and after you've experienced what you went through, you just want a
00:19:45
Speaker
You just wanted your child to be okay. So here you are unpacking then. So would you mind just diving? I know you dive much deeper in your memoir on the different tools that you use to navigate your grief, but would you please share with us some? Sure. The first one was really a product of my being a professor of literature. And I thought I was being extremely original.
00:20:09
Speaker
I started a program of reading the classic books. I went back to Homer, and then I read Dante, and I had taught both Homer and Dante, and then I was continuing on my journey through the classics when I realized that a lot of intellectual people do that. And so again, my question became, well, why do people do that?
00:20:29
Speaker
And I realized, I think there are a number of reasons they do it. One is that classic books tend to change over a lifetime and so you can plug into them at different moments and that's one reason. But I also think it's because classics are about really unpleasant stuff like
00:20:48
Speaker
killing your mother because she has killed your father, sleeping with your mother by mistake, doing a social protest and ending up getting buried alive. Dante takes a journey through hell. These are not
00:21:04
Speaker
These are not normal experiences, but they do amplify normal experiences, and I think that's why people read them. And intellectuals read them because there's an order. You do one, then you do the other, then there's Shakespeare, then there's Milton, then there's Alexander Pope, then there's Faulkner. I mean, it's a very stable order, and I think people like that. So that was the first thing I did, and then I started writing a book I thought about reading the classics, and I kept talking about myself. So I thought, ah, it's not about reading the classics.
00:21:34
Speaker
But that was part of it, reading the classics. Good. May I ask you, I'm so sorry, as we're pausing, in the classics, which one was one of those? And I don't know all of them. Shakespeare, I know more of because I studied theater. But which one was one that you, when you were reading, stirred up some kind of emotions of your grief that you were feeling either you could relate to something the author was saying,
00:22:00
Speaker
or how they expressed or certain phrases that might have stood out for you and your journey. Is there one that stands out of any that you read? Yeah. Well, there are two. One is Homer's The Odyssey, which is a book about coming home and has some very ugly scenes in it at the end, which I had conveniently
00:22:20
Speaker
Not forgotten, but I hadn't emphasized them in my memory. Well, probably also they weren't relevant maybe when you read them. Sometimes when we read something again. No, no, no. Like when we read something in a different space and where we are in our life, they have a completely different meaning.
00:22:35
Speaker
But the lines that resonated for me, the goddess Athena tells Odysseus' son, Telemachus, it is a wise child who knows his own father. I kept thinking it is a wise child who knows her own mother because I was pondering very much the extent to which I was like my mother and what my relationship with my mother was. So that was one. And then the opening lines of Dante's inferno, I'll say them in Italian and then I'll translate them.
00:23:12
Speaker
Oh, wait, no, don't translate. Let me see if I can, let me see if I picked up anything because I've been doing Duolingo. Okay. The mezzo, the middle of our life. Okay. The middle of our life is one that we may think we have to go through the jungle and then realize we have to go through the sea.
00:23:35
Speaker
something like that is when I heard jungle and I heard barita. So tell us, translate. Something like that. It's in the middle of the journey of our life, I found myself in a confusing forest and I lost my way. I was confused. Those are very powerful lines and that's what was happening to me. So those were the two classics that were most resonant for me. Beautiful. Thank you.
00:24:02
Speaker
The thing which was extremely helpful, I had done physical yoga for a long time, like most Americans, and not the greatest yoga body, short arms, short legs, but I do yoga for an hour every day and I still do it. But after my mother died, I started meditating every day for 18 minutes. And that was extremely important because it kind of chills your mind down.
00:24:25
Speaker
And like reading the classics takes you out of yourself, gives you a longer perspective on things. Just as you read the classics in a certain order, you go into meditation in a certain order. So it's like prayer, it's like doing a rosary, it's like chanting.
00:24:42
Speaker
It's a calming reason. Like a ritual. A ritual, a ritual, a ritual. Yeah. And so those were the things that were most powerful for me. And when you meditate long enough, whether you believe in it or not, it's very funny. Most people, I guess you don't really try meditation unless you're willing to give it a chance. But if you do give it a chance and you do it long enough, your breath slows down, you know, your blood pressure gets lower.
00:25:10
Speaker
And there are certain tools, just simple breathing things that you can do to calm yourself down at any moment.
Spiritual Approaches to Grief
00:25:16
Speaker
In fact, when I teach college and the students are getting all stressed at the end of the semester, I make them take a few deep breaths and I say, oh, did you notice that? That's different, right? And you know, it's just, it's important to be able to do that. So that was, putting all of that together was important to me because the subtitle of the book is books, family and memory without pain.
00:25:39
Speaker
And I don't know if memory is ever completely without pain, but you want to arrive at the point where you can retrieve parts of your past without it being a lacerating thing. And the reading of the classics and the meditating and the yoga, those were all mechanisms which allowed me to access memory without it being painful, without it being a source of power for me. Thank you so much because this is the first time ever in all the hundred and
00:26:08
Speaker
change interviews I've had that somebody has used reading the classics as one of their tools in their grief journey. Oh, really? Because the majority of us go straight to probably looking for that grief story, you know, a story of a memoir or somebody that's gone through, like somebody picking up your book as a way of going. I did that too. I did that too. This one
00:26:34
Speaker
There's a guy named Francesco Goldman who wrote a book called Say Her Name, which I thought was an extremely powerful memoir of losing his fiancée in a freak accident at the ocean. It was a beautiful book. I mean, I read Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, but I realized I was and I was not writing a grief memoir.
00:26:56
Speaker
Um, you know, I mean, I was, but, and I wasn't writing a self help book, but I wanted it. I guess I felt I had discovered something that worked for me and I wanted to give it in case it worked for somebody else. That is awesome. Thank you so much for, for sharing that. Now, may I ask being Italian American, how did, and you mentioned Rosary and you mentioned prayer, how did the aspect of
00:27:22
Speaker
spirituality or religious beliefs play a part in your grief journey or how did it not? How did it either help or impede your process of how you were grieving?
00:27:34
Speaker
The religion in which I was raised, which was Roman Catholicism, I would have to say did not help because people say that once you're a Catholic, you're always a Catholic. And I think to some extent that's true. It upsets me very much when I hear someone disrespect Jesus or the church, even though I'm not, I'm no longer a practicing Catholic. But the rituals of Catholicism are very, they're very formal and in the Catholic
00:28:04
Speaker
Mass services which my father had my mother had and my brother had it's very impersonal There's a you are to be comforted because we know that there's an afterlife you are to be comforted. That's it So when you don't feel that way did it end up feeling like you were doing something wrong in your grief journey if you're not feeling comforted and
00:28:26
Speaker
No, I felt like I was participating in something that had no power for me. The power of the Catholic wake, which I understand, it brings people together and there's inevitably some form of jollity breaks out and it's a counterpoise to the wake.
00:28:43
Speaker
But the idea of sitting with the body was also not especially helpful to me. I mean, I think it is helpful for people who are in that tradition and comfortable in that tradition. So these were rituals that were not potent rituals for me. What brings comfort for some in their grief may not be what brings comfort for others. It is so unique. And so for you, what you had grown up in
00:29:09
Speaker
was not necessarily the way that felt the right way per se for your own grief journey, but it might've been for somebody else and maybe for
Writing as a Coping Mechanism
00:29:19
Speaker
someone else. And that is what we love. That's what I love interviewing people with different upbringings and different perspectives because sometimes
00:29:27
Speaker
We also feel kind of inadequate when you're going somewhere and you're told that this is how you're supposed to feel and this is what is supposed to bring comfort and all of a sudden you're like, but I'm not feeling that way. Then this inadequacy about ourselves adds to that guilt and in our grief journey even as well. Why am I not feeling comfort in prayer? Why am I not feeling comfort in knowing there's an afterlife in my grief journey?
00:29:56
Speaker
right judge ourselves of course as a writer the writing was also a comforting thing for me and i think probably for most people as well because the the writing again it's a it's that requires order it requires regularity it requires sinking into yourself but not totally sinking into yourself it needs to be controlled
00:30:17
Speaker
to some extent, and all of those things. And that's why I would never disrespect somebody who found prayer a good mechanism, because in many ways that's what meditation was for me. I do find meditation a spiritual exercise, and I'm not a believing Buddhist, but the traditions in which I meditate are loosely speaking Hindu or Buddhist. Again, it's not an afterlife, but there's an energy in the universe
00:30:47
Speaker
And when you access that energy in the universe, you realize, well, that's in you. It's out of you. And that kind of vocabulary, what's in you and outside you, that is religious vocabulary.
Creating 'Crossing Back' and Its Impact
00:31:01
Speaker
And so as a spiritual insight, I think it's valuable and I think it's part of why meditation was such a good practice for me. In your journey. Thank you. Now take us into writing then this book.
00:31:13
Speaker
How was then that process cathartic really in you uncovering all these things and in your morning journey as you're writing?
00:31:23
Speaker
This is actually, I would say, the craziest book I've ever written. It's shapely, it's short, it's almost like a book of poems. It's discrete essays that you could read as discrete essays. It took me so long to write. It took me so long to write. Twelve years? Well, but normally I write books in about four or five years and they're much, they're
00:31:46
Speaker
They're denser, much more research-oriented books. But this is denser in terms of the emotions that you had to access to be able to write, too. This book was written in six different versions, had six different titles, and I couldn't give it the shape it wanted. And then finally I said, man, I'm going to do this. And when I couldn't make it work, I just took it out. And there it was. There was the shape I wanted, which was learning
00:32:16
Speaker
to accept grief, realizing that there were sustaining things in my life, my marriage, my profession, my children, my grandchildren now, and then accessing memory without pain. So once I took out what was extraneous, it had shape. And as a writer, there's great pleasure when you discover the shape of a book and you say,
00:32:39
Speaker
12 years to birth and now many more years of people enjoying and so forth. In all these different times up in which you're reading and editing and going back, is there judgment as an author? As you're right, I've never written a book. Oh, there's definitely judgment. As you're then doing this, how do you then separate a little bit to then see what is my reader looking for? Not just what am I?
00:33:04
Speaker
Well, one of the things you do, you put it aside, you put it aside, then when you come back to it, you're reading it, and if you're bored, you should take it out. So one of the things you do is to cut. But there's a kind of, there's a golden moment when you're writing memoir, when you really move yourself, and you may even be moved to tears.
00:33:24
Speaker
and man, you have hit pay dirt. Now that sounds very cynical, but it's true, you know, and even though it's grief recollected from a distance, when you recreate that, that's very, very powerful. When you publish with a press, I hate to break it to the aspiring authors out there, you finish the thing and if you're lucky, you see it in print a year later.
00:33:48
Speaker
So you have this imposed year of just nothing, and then copy editing, and then the page proofs arrive. And when the page proofs of Crossing Back arrived and I was reading it through, I just said, oh, hot damn. This is good. This is good. And it was really such a great feeling to have that happen. And again, it's a kind of
00:34:12
Speaker
It's not the mourners' reaction. It's the writers' reaction. I was just going to even ask in that editing process when you're being told, yeah, cut this. I mean, have you written seven books before? So you've been like, when they say, no, this chapter, da, da, da, da, but I really love it. Like, how do you detach?
00:34:29
Speaker
And there's got to be some brief component even of any other type of book when you kind of put your baby out there and then an editor's telling you, no, take this part off or take this part. And even like you said, even the reaction of some people to your titles of then you were even re-editing the title of your other book of taking off the other. So, gosh, it takes a lot.
00:34:52
Speaker
It does take a lot. I mean, one of the things that I have found very helpful and I was fortunate both with Crossing Ocean Parkway and with Crossing Back to be in a writers group when I was doing them. This hasn't always been the case for me, but there's something very sustaining about having friends read and getting friends opinions and trusting friends opinions.
00:35:11
Speaker
as you're revising. I've actually been very lucky in my editors. They've done what I would call light editing. The guy who copy edited crossing back.
00:35:22
Speaker
had so much knowledge about Sicilian culture in a very specific way, but I was actually in awe. I mean, there's a kind of Italian pastry that my mother made. It's called a swingy. It's fried dough. It's a beignet, yeah. The fancy name is a beignet. But a swingy, it's ricotta and flour, but you have to get the texture just right.
00:35:46
Speaker
So, in one of my chapters, I use making Shingi, my mother's recipes in general as a recipe, as analogies for writing. And the Shingi recipe, which was a very important recipe for my mother. So, it was a very symbolic recipe for me, and I lost it. And I was trying my mother's recipes, and I was writing them into a chapter for this book. And I couldn't find it. And then I received a text from my younger daughter, and it said, Mom!
00:36:13
Speaker
I did it. I found this Fiji recipe. And it was like World War II ends in Europe. You know, this Fiji recipe has been found. So I was able to make the Shingis and to recreate them. Yeah. The part of even just that, the aspect of food and passing along that legacy and the memories that they are not only associated with a culture, but like you said, like they remind you of
00:36:39
Speaker
what your mom used to make on these things and the cultural things. And again.
00:36:45
Speaker
Stepping into the role of the cook is to, again, it has sequences, it has regularity, it's in you, it's out of you, it's personal, it's impersonal. And so it has all the qualities of reading the classics and meditating. And I wasn't sure why it was making my mother's recipes, but it was important to me that I do so. That's beautiful, like, yeah, just for living. Yeah,
Audience Connection and Universal Appeal
00:37:08
Speaker
yeah, yeah. Anyway, this guy knew the whole story of Shingy and the variants in spelling, and we were talking about editors.
00:37:14
Speaker
And this editor knew all that. I said, man, that is amazing. Yeah. That is wonderful. Thank you for sharing that. They're really good. Now I want one. Now I want to thank you so much. Now, tell us anything else you'd want to share as to who would be someone that would relate to your books, either one, Crossing Ocean Parkway or Crossing Back.
00:37:37
Speaker
Yeah, well, I think anyone who is crossing is a metaphor that has to do with moving from one place to another. So anyone who's involved in some kind of conglomerate culture, and I think that's lots of people these days. If you're Asian American and married to an African American or to an Anglo American or whatever, anyone who's involved in that kind of hybrid relationship, I think would find either book very powerful.
00:38:06
Speaker
Anyone who is experiencing loss or grief, I think, would find either book very powerful. There's humor in books. I mean, there's a tendency in my writing to go for the joke, so that's important too. There's a chapter in Crossing Back about
00:38:25
Speaker
being an academic, a chair of a department and what that's like. So academics, I think, would enjoy that chapter as well. Duke University is a school which attracts scandal and I found myself in the middle of one, you know, kind of it's a long time ago now, but there it was.
00:38:42
Speaker
I think somebody who takes a lot of pleasure in writing, so I think anyone who's interested in yoga, this book would be terrific. Anyone who's interested in Italian Americans or Jewish Americans, especially the first book, Cross the Ocean Park. That's awesome. Thank you so much for sharing because, yeah, sometimes it's like, okay, what was this book for? And a lot of times we may not think that we may associate with something in the book, and then we do find
00:39:03
Speaker
like you said, these things that would relate. No, no, I think Southerners really relate, gay people really relate. Asian American culture and Italian American culture have a lot in common. So there's a kind of relationship there as well. I want to read one of the bits that somebody wrote regarding crossing back that I was sent here in the email about you. Mariana Torgovnik looks back without anger, but the compassion and acceptance even for herself
00:39:34
Speaker
at her life and successful career. Re-examining key elements of her past, including ethnic mobility, family quarrels, and unfinished grief, professional crisis, moves, separations, and reinventions, she writes a new life narrative, a generous and relatable memoir that will chime with the feelings of many readers at this post-pandemic
Post-Pandemic Reflections and Closing Thoughts
00:39:59
Speaker
time of reflection and emergence.
00:40:02
Speaker
And this was by Elaine Showalter, a professor at Princeton University. So that right there, I think, summarizes for sure the crossing back and who can relate to that. And how amazing to hear. Is it like when you hear those things, those things? No, that's absolutely great. That's absolutely great. And I would stress again, because we're all kind of emerging from something right now. And for most of us, it's a movement.
00:40:32
Speaker
a more expansive movement. We were constricted and there was harm and we're now having to assess what that harm is and how to readjust. That was a lovely statement by Elaine Showman. I know, like how does it feel for you when you read when you read the things? Oh it's got to be so moving to hear like what somebody's been touched by something you've written and
00:40:54
Speaker
and what they take meaning out of it. So is there any last words you want to tell our listeners before we close off? I just want to tell your listeners to keep on doing what they're doing and to just realize that
00:41:12
Speaker
There's always a chance to reform yourself, you know, and go for it. And I wanted to thank you for having me. I am so glad you were here. And I'll be linking your website where people can find. Do you want to say other places in which people can find your books? Oh, yeah, you can find it on Amazon. You can find it on Barnes and Noble.
00:41:32
Speaker
websites. I suppose in the brick and mortar stores as well. And you can find, I think most people go to Amazon, so there's Kindle. Kindle costs almost as much as the hardcover, so choose what you wish. It's a university press, so they do that. But it's a worthy read, so I would kind of look for it. And my website is my name. I'll put that one down below. Thank you so much again.
00:42:04
Speaker
Thank you again so much for choosing to listen today. I hope that you can take away a few nuggets from today's episode that can bring you comfort in your times of grief. If so, it would mean so much to me if you would rate and comment on this episode. And if you feel inspired in some way to share it with someone who may need to hear this, please do so.
00:42:32
Speaker
Also, if you or someone you know has a story of grief and gratitude that should be shared so that others can be inspired as well, please reach out to me. And thanks once again for tuning into Grief Gratitude and the Gray in Between podcast. Have a beautiful day.