Italian Bones in the Snow: A Memoir in Shorts

By Elaina Battista-Parsons

Book Overview

Italian women don't always speak with their hands and cook with cheese. They use their eyes, legs, and fresh parsley too. They race around the kitchen, work a bunch of tasks at once, and get up after being knocked down. Then there's the penchant for silent energies, colors, and music of all genres being played through large living room speakers in 1984.

But growing up as an Italian-American girl is not always baked ziti and the loud yelling dramatized on the big screen. In Italian Bones in the Snow, Elaina Battista-Parsons shines light on a palpable spirituality, a quiet adoration of nature, and a habit of speaking up-particularly when it's modeled and deemed a survival skill. She explores the people and places in her life that stuck to her soul like candle wax. She celebrates pop culture, cemeteries, her boots, and 1980s nostalgia. Switching between prose and verse, she offers up real life stories about her relationship with Catholicism, winter weather, mental health, and men throughout her life.

Lyrical, poignant, and raw, these memoir shorts are all adorned in the unstoppable forces of nature called grandmothers, mother, and aunts. By the time you turn the last page, not only will you know Elaina better, but you'll also know yourself.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1925965821
• ISBN13: 9781925965827
• Release Date: February 2022
• Publisher: Vine Leaves Press
• Length: 196 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.0" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

Memoir you will love....

Elaina’s memoir is a beautifully woven collection of moments in the life of a once naïve young lady who negotiated her interactions with boys and men with an air of desperation and false confidence (as most of us did). Paired with snapshots of her life today, these moments read as learning experiences that helped forge her identity as a strong-willed and unapologetic woman – one who is a unique mosaic of every female who had a hand in raising her, every friend that staggered through youth with her, and her two girls who still inspire the work in progress she admits to being today. Every woman was young once, full of conviction about what love is. Then they had to grow up, live, and redefine that love. A strong woman is someone like the author, someone with the understanding that growth is introspection and a willingness to learn and change your ideas. I am not Italian-American. What I got from the memoir is that her Italian-American identity had everything to do with, and, noting to do with the person she became. As her book makes so very clear - Elaina is a WOMAN first, an Italian-American second. Every reader will find a bit of their own history in this memoir – you will find your mother, your sister, your aunt, your grandmother, and hopefully, yourself.