Hello everyone,

I’m handing my blog over today to my friend and fellow author, Amy Impellizzeri.

This is one of the most touching, memorable blogs I’ve read about another family member. Amy writes about her grandmother, her black and white TV,  tuna melts, lipstick stained cigarettes and  clinical depression. It’s a beautiful, and sad, look into someone else’s life. 

(Need a book for the holidays? I’d highly recommend Amy’s Secrets of Worry Dolls.)

By Amy Impellizzeri:

My newest novel, Secrets of Worry Dolls, is about mothers and daughters. And since I am both of those things, it might be tempting to read something personal into my characters. But I have to admit that there is someone else I thought of often as I wrote this story. In fact, Secrets of Worry Dolls is dedicated to my Grandmother, Lois, In Memoriam.

“Because her legacy both haunts and inspires me daily.

And because she would have gotten a really big kick out of having a book of mine dedicated to her.”

 

***

My earliest memories of my grandmother include the rabbit-eared television set and the overstuffed eggplant-colored sofa in her two-bedroom apartment where I used to go for sleepovers as a little girl.  Bright lipstick-stained cigarette remnants piled high on a television tray table by the sofa.  Coffee and milk were served in mis-matched china cups.  Store-bought lemon cookies were served up as decadent desserts.

Mine was no ordinary Grandma.

When I visited her, meals were served at the local diner where my grandmother was considered a regular.  Poached eggs, black coffee and unfiltered cigarettes were called breakfast.  Tuna melts, black coffee and unfiltered cigarettes were called dinner.  Grandma would drive us to the diner in her manual Dodge Dart and home again to watch the news on her small black and white TV.  Once a year we’d watch the Miss America pageant instead of the news, relying on the broadcaster to tell us the colors of the women’s gowns. She’d let me read her Shel Silverstein collection, or browse through the rest of her library of dog-eared books. I don’t think my grandmother owned a single book she’d only read once. We’d turn in early, and I’d sleep in a thin sleeping bag on the hard floor and she’d snore loudly in her bed above me.

The older I get, the more I cling to this collage of images I want forever connected to my grandmother. They are uniquely mine, and they represent a thin sliver of time when my grandmother was – for all intents and purposes – well.

My grandmother was diagnosed with clinical depression when her two young daughters were still toddlers. I have mostly overheard details about my mother’s childhood, and have unraveled a past in which my grandmother was largely … Gone. Later, when I was born, somehow my grandmother came back into the picture – for her own version of maternal redemption in the form of Dodge Dart sleepovers.

And in those years that I knew her as a young child, my grandmother was independent.  Happy even.  A working, single woman with her own bank account and a reserved corner booth at the local diner.  To my young eyes, she seemed quite fearless.  Quite interesting.  If you had asked me then, I would have told you that I wanted to be just. Like. Her.

The deterioration occurred largely in my later teen years.  Remission over, the disease of her mind emerged from the shadows, swallowing her whole.  The sleepovers ceased.  No more driving.  No more diners.  Dinners out were on the hospital psych ward where she began spending more and more nights.

More overhearing.  More unraveling.

And then. An unexpected diagnosis came when I was 25 years old.  My grandmother had an inoperable malignant brain tumor that was going to kill her at the premature age of 66. Which meant she would never be healed of her mental illness.

Her legacy became fear. My fear of having wished to be just. Like. Her.

And truth be told, that might have been her legacy always, except for the fact that fifteen years after my grandmother’s death, my mother called me.  “I have something for you.  Your grandmother’s sister found something she wanted you to have. A folder. Do you want it?”

Yes. Please.

My grandmother, you see, was a writer.

***

I waited until my husband was at work and the kids were all occupied and then I sat on the middle of my bed surrounded by sheaves of paper I pulled out of the lilac-colored folder.  I stared at them.  Fifty-year old thin sheets – created on a typewriter before my birth, with little “x’s” over some of the letters for corrections.  I rubbed my hands over the pages knowing that she had touched them. I sorted through her essays about the diner.  About her sisters.  Former neighbors and lovers. Letters to her favorite newspaper columnist. It was hard to focus on the words because the emotions swirled almost palpably on the pages. I found a five-page stapled essay that began with a quote from Tennessee Williams’ “The Night of the Iguana.”

 

“O Courage, could you not as well

Select a second place to dwell.”

 

My grandmother wanted to be courageous and fearless. She wrote about moving toward healing, and resolutions, and love. But her writings – like her life – ended abruptly. I couldn’t help but wish she had written a better ending for herself. A more hopeful legacy.

So I did. As I closed the lilac-colored folder, I resolved to live – and write – a more hopeful story than fear.

Yes, Secrets of Worry Dolls is about mothers and daughters. But at its core, Secrets of Worry Dolls is a story about legacies; it’s about tragedy and survival. And while I think it’s probably true that we can’t write anyone’s story but our own, I also believe that no one’s story is ever really written in stone.

 

Visit with Amy –

facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ImpellizzeriAmy

Website: http://www.amyimpellizzeri.com/