The House of Early Sorrows

Book excerpt: "As the child of children of immigrants, Louise DeSalvo was at first reluctant to write about her truths. Her abusive father, her sister's suicide, her illness. In this stunning collection of her captivating and frank essays on her life and her Italian-American culture, Louise DeSalvo centers on her beginnings, reframing and revising her acclaimed memoiristic essays, pieces that were the seeds of longer collections, to reveal her true power as a memoirist: the ability to dig ever deeper for personal and political truths that illuminate what it means to be a woman, a child of Italian immigrants, a writer, and a scholar"--