Big Brains and Broken Hearts: Excerpts from a Life

Upwardly mobile father born into an impoverished Italian immigrant neighborhood succeeds in becoming a medical doctor and moving his family to an upper middle class suburb. His children attend Irish Catholic schools where they are stereotyped and excluded, but succeed academically. One of the children has Down's syndrome. Family dynamics depend on grief and embarrassment and duty. One dutiful son is in denial, closeted, and married. He is an obsessive student who gets into Yale. He finds his way to Naples in search of his true identity and the world that his grandparents lost by coming to America and integrating into the American middle class. In his fifties he loses everything and then rebuilds a new life as an Italian American and gay.