THREE DREAMERS

Carcaterra recounts the lives of three remarkable women in his life.

The child of Italian immigrants to New York, Carcaterra returned to his family seat on the island of Ischia when he was 14. “The sounds, smells, sights were all foreign,” he recalls, “but somehow I knew from those very first moments it was a world where I belonged.” He fell under the tutelage of a grandmother who could be a touch scary but who offered shelter from his abusive father back home and whose approach to life was utterly practical and consistently charming. Flowery Ischia beckoned each summer, and Carcaterra learned more stories—e.g., about his grandmother’s fierce and fearless resistance in the face of the island’s Nazi occupiers during World War II. The second strong woman in the story is the author’s mother, who bore the death of her first husband and a child with a grim stoicism and sadness that forever haunted her. “I would have loved to meet the happy version of my mother….That young woman remains a mystery to me,” Carcaterra writes affectingly. He received a glimpse when, working as a fledgling journalist with an editor with whom he would fall in love—his third subject—he wrote a profile of his mother that required her to appear at a photo session. Even though she was mistrustful at first, she shined brightly. The most difficult reading—and likely the most difficult writing for the author—comes with his portrait of that editor, who became his wife (he courted her with a think piece on the Three Stooges). Sadly, she died too young, leaving him with children of his own to continue the legacy: “Each time I see them, I hear her voice and I see her smile and I feel her love through them.”

Elegantly and sensitively written, a book that forges strong connections across four generations.