Advice for Italian Boys (26 page)

The café, renamed Café Fratelli,
was very much like other cafés where the owners have no taste for trends or fashions. The Fells, the one time they came to see it, out of curiosity, after they had become very rich, thought that it was somewhat shabby, and very inferior to the coffee shops they frequented in the centre of the city.

“Very common tables and chairs, nothing out of the ordinary. Not much of a business,” Bella whispered into Phil’s small, grey ear. But in spite of these deficiencies, the wishes, the hopes, the confidence and the predictions of the three brothers who ran it over many years to come were fully answered in its success.

Ideas, interviews & features

B
ORN IN
W
ESTON
, Ontario, now part of Toronto, and raised in Toronto and Ottawa, Anne Giardini was, in her words, a blend of her “gentle and creative mother,” acclaimed Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Carol Shields, and her “resolute engineer father.” The second of five children, she was a dreamy child who lived in two places, she says, “the real world and inside the stories I scrolled out in my head.”

Giardini liked to tell stories to her three sisters, whom she remembers as “the most attentive and astute of audiences.” And she thought for a time that she might become an actress—until she realized she “had absolutely no talent for it.” After high school she started a degree in economics, by accident, at the University of Ottawa. A registration clerk recommended she try “poli-sci,” meaning political science. Giardini thought she meant “poly-sci,” meaning many sciences, and so agreed. The clerk then suggested that people who took poli-sci also often took economics, and Giardini signed up for that too. “When I showed up for my first political science class, while I was wondering at the absence of Bunsen burners, the professor held up a book called
Anatomy of a Coup
and said, ‘I’m going to teach you how to overthrow the government of a small country.’ I remember leaning forward in my chair and thinking,
This is all I ever really wanted to know.”

After finishing her degree, Giardini was drawn to the study of law, with its “rigour, challenges and creative use of language, and its many stories.” She went on to obtain her
LLB from the University of British Columbia, and her LLM from Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge, in England. She was called to the bar in British Columbia in 1986 and in Ontario in 1990.

She is not surprised at all, she says, that so many lawyers she meets want to write fiction, because the law is all about stories. “It contains thousands—millions—of individual narratives, and it creates from all of these narrative threads a good part of the cloth, the stuff, that we call society.”

She says it is inescapable that her mother would be the greatest influence on her writing. The first time Giardini realized that her mother was a writer, Shields had just won the CBC Young Writers Competition. “Her winning poem was read on the air. I was about four or five and I was lying on my back on the kitchen floor. She was standing up and we were both listening to her words over the radio. It just seemed like absolute magic.”

Among Giardini’s many writing projects was a 1996 collaboration with her mother, a paper they delivered at a meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America. Entitled “Martians in Jane Austen,” the paper applied archetypes from John Gray’s
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus
to the characters in Austen’s novels. Also, for three years in the late 1990s, Giardini wrote a column for the
National Post
, which she describes as the best possible writing experience.

In “Still Life with Power,” an essay Giardini wrote for the collection
Dropped Threads
(2001), edited by Carol Shields and Marjorie Anderson, she explored some of the themes that would feed her future novels. Giardini
wrote about power and how surprising it seemed to her that it was assumed and wielded so differently by men and women. She had begun a novel, called
Assiniboine
, and was startled to discover that her central female character kept being pushed aside by a male character, who insisted on taking up the narrative. “I marvelled at this, and concluded that my subconscious, aware in its peculiar way that I was striving to write a ‘serious’ novel, was seeking to ensure that it be led by a serious protagonist, and that a male would perhaps be more likely to be taken seriously than a female. I spoke of this with my mother and these discussions made their way into her last novel,
Unless
, and into my first novel,
The Sad Truth About Happiness
. Norah, the daughter in
Unless
who is so dismayed at the state of the world, shares both some of these concerns and my birthday.”

Sadly, Shields, who died in July 2003 after a five-year battle with breast cancer, never had a chance to read her daughter’s first work of fiction.
The Sad Truth About Happiness
(2005) went on to become a bestseller and was shortlisted for the Amazon.ca/
Books in Canada
First Novel Award and the 2007 Audie Award, honouring excellence in audio publishing.

Since 1994, Giardini has worked for the Canadian subsidiary of Weyerhaeuser Company, an integrated forest products corporation, and she is now president of the Canadian company.

Giardini is a frequent speaker on legal topics, and on issues affecting girls and women. She was recently a member of the
BC Law Society’s Retention of Women in Law Task Force, is chair of the Vancouver International Writers & Readers Festival, and has been appointed to the Board of Governors of Simon Fraser University.

Anne Giardini lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with her husband of more than twenty years, Tony Giardini. They have three children, two in university and one still at home. Giardini is at work on her third novel.

What incident or observation inspired you to write
Advice for Italian Boys?

Over twenty years ago, I married into an Italian-Canadian family. I was somewhat surprised to find that this new family of mine was a fountain of advice of all kinds—advice on career decisions and clothes, on pregnancies and child rearing, and on health, wealth and happiness. At first, I was taken aback. So much advice! Over time, I grew more used to it, but I know that I resented, to a slight extent, the assurance and intrusiveness of the advice I was given. When, finally, some of this surplus counsel became the foundation for
Advice for Italian Boys
, I realized how fortunate I was as a novelist to have this wonderful material—given to me for free!—for this book, and perhaps for a sequel. I am writing a different novel now, but I may come back to the three Pavone men in a future book.

How different would the novel have been if you didn’t have the insights derived from your personal experience with the Italian-Canadian side of your family?

The novel could not have existed if I hadn’t married into this family. The Giardini family have simply enfolded me, and have shared with me feelings and experiences and stories that I could not have known in any other way. I am certain that I would have had other experiences, and that these would have led to
a novel, but that novel could not have been
Advice for Italian Boys
.

And I could not, without my wonderful mother-in-law, Gilda Giardini, have learned enough of the Calabrese dialect to begin to understand the strength, good sense and peculiar world view of the Calabrese
proverbi
, or sayings.

What’s the most surprising aspect of marrying into a Canadian-Italian family? What’s the best part?

Most surprising has been the loyalty that this adopted tribe has among them, and has extended to me. The best part is the love, of course, but this is followed closely by the food. In some ways, I have come to understand, the food is the love made manifest.

Your protagonist, Nicolo, is faced with some bewildering life choices. Do you believe that being part of a family that comes to this culture from another makes such choices harder, or easier?

I think being part of a family that comes from a strong culture like this one makes most choices significantly easier. I mean by this the normal choices we all must make: whether to marry and who, what studies to take, what work to do, how to raise one’s children. However, a strong cultural base can make it more difficult to make unusual decisions because the patterns of how one should live are more entrenched, and so can be harder to break from. ?

Did the writing ever take you in unexpected directions?

Advice for Italian Boys
was a gift. Almost the entire plot came to me in an instant one morning on a rainy day in Vancouver, as I stood in a queue at a coffee shop waiting to order my daily caffe latte. The story did take some unexpected directions when I sat down to write it. I had been determined to send Nonna back to Italy during the course of the book. She was even more determined not to go! I was also surprised by Nicolo’s sexuality as it unfolded. He was more complicated than I had imagined. And he had a firmly fixed moral core—I wasn’t expecting this in such a young man.

What surprised me most, though, was that this book wanted to be about married life, as well as about Nicolo. There are many scenes of marriage in
Advice for Italian Boys
, and I have come to believe that marriage is in some ways a constant giving of advice from one partner to the other. A well-functioning couple comes to decisions, and stays on or shifts course as a result of subtle signals from one to the other. Most of this is silent and almost invisible. I wonder sometimes, with the divorce rate being what it is, if this is a skill set that has been lost or whether relationships may have become too charged with concerns about power and equality. In the best marriages, I think, this giving and receiving of advice is done tacitly, in kindness and trust.

Advice for Italian Boys
has been called a “quiet, reflective novel,” but there’s humour as well. I am thinking, for example, of the quirky characters that frequent the gym. Which writing comes most naturally to you?

Some of the advice that made its way over here from southern Italy relies on humour to bring home its point, and this sense of humour made its way into
Advice for Italian Boys
quite naturally. But I don’t think of myself as a humorous novelist. I like to think that my writing reflects people as they are, in all their iterations and all their moods. This makes my writing reflective, but also makes it funny: humans never cease to amaze and amuse us.

Nicolo’s nonna’s dream memories of her life back in Italy are incredibly evocative. How did you render these so convincingly?

I have spent time in Italy, and so know how it looks and smells and tastes, and so forth. But what I really strove to capture in
Advice for Italian Boys
were not my own experiences but rather the memories of, and a kind of longing for, an Italy that no longer exists—the Italy that I have heard about when speaking with my mother-in-law, and her brother Rudy, who died fairly recently, and her niece Josephine.

Is there a particular scene from the novel that characterizes the book for you, or that lingers in your mind?

I often think about the scene in which Nicolo experiences an unusual sense of dislocation when he goes to the theatre with Zoe. He feels himself flowing into her, as if she has become permeable and he is able to move into her skin. For the shortest possible moment, he feels her body from the inside, sees through her eyes, hears what she hears, breathes as she breathes. He understands that she is both knowable and unknowable. Ultimately I think that it is this knowing, coupled with a sense of ongoing mystery as a counterpoint, that keeps a relationship strong.

This is echoed in another scene between Nicolo’s parents, Paola and Massimo. Massimo has come home somewhat upset after an incident at work, but he is a proud man and doesn’t tell Paola about it. Later, they are in bed, “as close together as a single sheet of origami paper folded cleverly into two nested figures: sleeping husband, sleeping wife. She felt her eyes fill, so concerned was she for this man, for his hidden sorrows whatever they were, and she thought of a rhyme from her youth.
Se vai’ a lettu non mipidghija sonnu. Pensu a’ I’amuri e mi ment’ a ciangiri
. If I go to bed, I won’t be able to sleep. I’ll think of love and start to weep.” Paola strokes Massimo’s hair. They make love and then fall asleep, so close both physically and emotionally that any secrets harboured can only be minor and can do them no harm.

What is the most important wisdom you hope you’ve passed on to your own children—your version of Nonna’s
proverbi?

I don’t think I give my children advice in the form of axioms or adages, the way that Nonna does in
Advice for Italian Boys
. Nonna is
analfabeta
—illiterate. She comes from a culture that didn’t have encyclopedias or libraries or Google. The sayings she passes on to her grandchildren represent a method of storing and passing on wisdom that we don’t rely on anymore. Having said that, I do like to pass on a piece of my mother’s advice, particularly to young women, which is this: always be as intelligent as you are.

What did you learn—about the craft of writing, or about life in general—through the process of researching and writing
Advice for Italian Boys?

I discovered that my inner lode of love and respect for the family that I married into is wider and deeper than I had realized. About writing, I learned to trust my characters—once they are fully imagined, they will act as they will and I can have faith in them to lead me into and through their stories. About life, I learned that advice freely given is sometimes worth having, and that the best forms of advice are often not so much spoken as shown; the manner in which someone we love and respect chooses to live is the very best advice, if we are alive to it.