Death & Grief
![Lorenzo Carcaterra - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B000APX7XM.jpg)
Three Dreamers: A Memoir of Family
"As nourishing as a three-course Italian feast, this is a fierce, moving tribute to the ties that bind."-People (Book of the Week)
The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Sleepers offers a heartfelt homage to the women who taught him courage, kindness, and the power of storytelling: his mother, his grandmother, and his late wife.
Standing with his children near his grandmother's grave on a recent trip to Ischia, an island off the coast of Naples, Lorenzo Carcaterra realized how much of his life has been shaped by the women who taught him how to look for joy and overcome sorrow. This book is his tribute to them.
Nonna Maria, his grandmother, gave him his first taste of a loving home during the summers he spent with her as a teenager on Ischia. With her kindness, her humor, and the same formidable strength she employed to make secret trips for food when the Nazis occupied Ischia during World War II, she instilled in him the importance of community, providing shelter for a boy whose home life was difficult.
His mother, Raffaela, dealt with daily hardships: a loveless and abusive marriage, the burden of debt, and a life of dread. Though the lessons she taught were harsh, they would drive Lorenzo from the world they shared to the better one she always prayed he would find.
The third woman is his wife, Susan, a gifted editor and his professional champion. Their marriage lasted three decades before her death from lung cancer in 2013. While their upbringings were wildly different, their love and friendship never wavered-and neither did her faith in Lorenzo's talent and potential as a writer.
The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Sleepers offers a heartfelt homage to the women who taught him courage, kindness, and the power of storytelling: his mother, his grandmother, and his late wife.
Standing with his children near his grandmother's grave on a recent trip to Ischia, an island off the coast of Naples, Lorenzo Carcaterra realized how much of his life has been shaped by the women who taught him how to look for joy and overcome sorrow. This book is his tribute to them.
Nonna Maria, his grandmother, gave him his first taste of a loving home during the summers he spent with her as a teenager on Ischia. With her kindness, her humor, and the same formidable strength she employed to make secret trips for food when the Nazis occupied Ischia during World War II, she instilled in him the importance of community, providing shelter for a boy whose home life was difficult.
His mother, Raffaela, dealt with daily hardships: a loveless and abusive marriage, the burden of debt, and a life of dread. Though the lessons she taught were harsh, they would drive Lorenzo from the world they shared to the better one she always prayed he would find.
The third woman is his wife, Susan, a gifted editor and his professional champion. Their marriage lasted three decades before her death from lung cancer in 2013. While their upbringings were wildly different, their love and friendship never wavered-and neither did her faith in Lorenzo's talent and potential as a writer.
Editorial Reviews
"I loved Lorenzo Carcaterra's Three Dreamers, a poignant, unflinching, and uniquely powerful memoir. Carcaterra paints a fascinating, moving, and page-turning portrait of three unforgettable women, each a product of her time, culture, and even location, whether Hell's Kitchen in New York City or the beautiful island of Ischia in Italy. But even more than that, through his transcendent talent, honesty, and emotional intelligence, Carcaterra has created a work that explores what women mean to the men in their lives, writ large. This is a book about love, about family, and about forgiveness. Every mother should read this book."-Lisa Scottoline, #1 New York Times bestselling author
"Lorenzo Carcaterra looks back over his life and writes of the women that shaped his world view. During boyhood summers on Ischia, Lorenzo's Italian grandmother fed him stories and great meals, which built his imagination. His mother, Raffaella, through grief and hardship, sharpened the edges of his ambition, while his wife, Susan, an important journalist, served as the first reader of his bestselling books and a champion of his work. This deeply personal memoir weaves beauty, hilarity, and loss into a glorious tapestry." -Adriana Trigiani, New York Times bestselling author
"Three Dreamers is a stunning triptych-a plaiting together of the lives of three powerful women who, together, have shaped the life and outlook of one man. This beautiful memoir is Lorenzo Carcaterra's tribute to the most important women in his life, and a paean to joy, sorrow, and love."-Elissa Altman, author of Motherland
"With keen perception and even-keeled acceptance, Carcaterra shares the stories of his grandmother, mother, and wife as he traces how their relationships encouraged him to pursue his dream of becoming a writer."-Booklist
"A moving tribute . . . With spare yet resounding prose, Carcaterra follows these women from his childhood home in Hell's Kitchen to the Italian island of Ischia, to the battles each of them fought at the end of their lives. This emotional narrative isn't for the fainthearted, but its beauty is a thing to behold."-...
"Lorenzo Carcaterra looks back over his life and writes of the women that shaped his world view. During boyhood summers on Ischia, Lorenzo's Italian grandmother fed him stories and great meals, which built his imagination. His mother, Raffaella, through grief and hardship, sharpened the edges of his ambition, while his wife, Susan, an important journalist, served as the first reader of his bestselling books and a champion of his work. This deeply personal memoir weaves beauty, hilarity, and loss into a glorious tapestry." -Adriana Trigiani, New York Times bestselling author
"Three Dreamers is a stunning triptych-a plaiting together of the lives of three powerful women who, together, have shaped the life and outlook of one man. This beautiful memoir is Lorenzo Carcaterra's tribute to the most important women in his life, and a paean to joy, sorrow, and love."-Elissa Altman, author of Motherland
"With keen perception and even-keeled acceptance, Carcaterra shares the stories of his grandmother, mother, and wife as he traces how their relationships encouraged him to pursue his dream of becoming a writer."-Booklist
"A moving tribute . . . With spare yet resounding prose, Carcaterra follows these women from his childhood home in Hell's Kitchen to the Italian island of Ischia, to the battles each of them fought at the end of their lives. This emotional narrative isn't for the fainthearted, but its beauty is a thing to behold."-...
Readers Top Reviews
RNOH*TUDOR^QUEEN*
I loved every page of this book. Cannot recommend it highly enough. Especially compelling for those of us with Italian ancestry.
Patricia M. Harper
Interesting story combining three stories and well written.
wjbJoan M. Crosby
I am not sure what it was about this memoir, however, I felt as if he was skimming over a lot of details. I have read other books by this author and enjoyed them, so I believe he is a good writer. However, this one didn't work.
Cookie Mom
Being of Italian descent myself, I truly enjoyed this book and the characters in it. It was interesting, educational and I will enjoy reading his other books. Even though it was non-fiction, it read like a novel and kept my interest all the way through. Bravo!
Kindle
Sounds like what a memoir should be of course. Yet these three women are their own unique selves thanks to the skills of the story teller. The clarity of each woman is so distinct and informative in different ways. Each formed the author in ways the others could not have done. A favorite memoir of mine now.
Short Excerpt Teaser
Chapter 1
Maria
Summer 1969
I was fourteen when I first set foot on the island of Ischia, eighteen miles off the coast of Naples, Italy.
I was visiting my mother's side of the family, strangers to me in every way, and I had no idea what to expect. Yet, somehow, as soon as I stepped off the boat from Naples, surrounded by thick hordes of tourists and locals eager to get to their destination, I knew I was in a better place than the one I had left behind.
I arrived in Ischia a troubled teenager. Back in New York, I left parents waging a daily war over heavy debts and mounting bills, their anger always at full boil, my mother one stinging comment away from receiving a fatal blow at my father's hand. The constant squabbles, the scams and cons my father pulled on gullible friends and neighbors, hung heavy on my shoulders, with my own fears and concerns. I wanted a different life from the dead-end existence that engulfed me in New York, but I couldn't figure out where that life would be or where it would lead.
I had argued without success against coming to Ischia, preferring to join friends and a cousin for a month of baseball camp. But money for baseball camp was scarce, especially when a round-trip coach ticket on Alitalia cost a mere sixty-eight dollars, and my father's fear of the drugs that had invaded our neighborhood far outweighed any qualms I had about getting on a plane to Rome, a train to Naples, and a boat to Ischia.
At least I knew there would be no language barrier to overcome. My mother never bothered to learn English, and the only language I spoke until I started grade school was Italian, specifically the Southern Italian dialect spoken on Ischia. And I had been raised on a steady diet of pasta with clam sauce on Fridays, pasta with red sauce on Sundays, and pasta with lentils or beans or squid or oil and garlic the rest of the week, so I didn't imagine food would be an issue.
I picked up my bags and made my way through the port, passing massive buses filled with German tourists and cabs waiting to take passengers to their hotels. I spotted several horse-drawn carriages parked on side streets and walked past a handful of coffee bars and gelato stands. In every corner of the port, men stood in small circles, smoking and waving their hands, engaged in animated discussions; old women walked slowly under a hot morning sun, arms linked together in a casual embrace, many wearing loose-fitting summer dresses; younger women, most of them pushing small children in snug strollers, made their way through the crowd, bathing suits clearly visible under their thin wraparounds. It was all so different from the world I had left behind. The sounds, smells, sights were all foreign, but somehow I knew from those very first moments it was a world where I truly belonged.
I reached into the front pocket of my jeans and pulled out a folded piece of paper. My mother had written out the simple set of directions I would need to reach my grandmother's home.
I walked up Via Roma and made a sharp left just before the start of the steep hill that led to Saint Peter's Church. A quarter of the way into the narrow walkway, I turned right and took two steps down into a small square that had a stone wall on one side and three homes on the other. It was here, at the last house in the square, that I first saw my Italian grandmother, Maria Mattera Carcaterra.
She was wearing a widow's black blouse, long skirt, and black sandals. Her thick hair, rolled in the back into a circular bun, was as white as a cloud. She waited until I was at the base of the stairway and casually waved me up. She then turned and headed back into her home, walking with a slight limp favoring her right leg. I made it up the stairs and rested my bags in the foyer. The walls were made of stone and painted white, the large room dominated by a dining table and two small couches. There were two large framed photos on opposite walls, each encased in a thick old wooden frame. One I knew must be of my grandfather, Gabriel, clearly taken when he was a young man. Nonna Maria came out of the kitchen and looked at me. Her eyes were dark and penetrating but with a hint of mischief in them. She stepped closer to me and I reached out my right hand, ready to shake hers and kiss her on both cheeks, as I had been told was the customary way to greet friends and family. She ignored my outstretched hand and wrapped her arms around me, holding me close to her for several moments, neither one of us saying a word. She then kissed me on top of my head, held me for a few seconds longer, and relaxed her arms. "The bathroom is down the hall," she said in Italian, nodding tow...
Maria
Summer 1969
I was fourteen when I first set foot on the island of Ischia, eighteen miles off the coast of Naples, Italy.
I was visiting my mother's side of the family, strangers to me in every way, and I had no idea what to expect. Yet, somehow, as soon as I stepped off the boat from Naples, surrounded by thick hordes of tourists and locals eager to get to their destination, I knew I was in a better place than the one I had left behind.
I arrived in Ischia a troubled teenager. Back in New York, I left parents waging a daily war over heavy debts and mounting bills, their anger always at full boil, my mother one stinging comment away from receiving a fatal blow at my father's hand. The constant squabbles, the scams and cons my father pulled on gullible friends and neighbors, hung heavy on my shoulders, with my own fears and concerns. I wanted a different life from the dead-end existence that engulfed me in New York, but I couldn't figure out where that life would be or where it would lead.
I had argued without success against coming to Ischia, preferring to join friends and a cousin for a month of baseball camp. But money for baseball camp was scarce, especially when a round-trip coach ticket on Alitalia cost a mere sixty-eight dollars, and my father's fear of the drugs that had invaded our neighborhood far outweighed any qualms I had about getting on a plane to Rome, a train to Naples, and a boat to Ischia.
At least I knew there would be no language barrier to overcome. My mother never bothered to learn English, and the only language I spoke until I started grade school was Italian, specifically the Southern Italian dialect spoken on Ischia. And I had been raised on a steady diet of pasta with clam sauce on Fridays, pasta with red sauce on Sundays, and pasta with lentils or beans or squid or oil and garlic the rest of the week, so I didn't imagine food would be an issue.
I picked up my bags and made my way through the port, passing massive buses filled with German tourists and cabs waiting to take passengers to their hotels. I spotted several horse-drawn carriages parked on side streets and walked past a handful of coffee bars and gelato stands. In every corner of the port, men stood in small circles, smoking and waving their hands, engaged in animated discussions; old women walked slowly under a hot morning sun, arms linked together in a casual embrace, many wearing loose-fitting summer dresses; younger women, most of them pushing small children in snug strollers, made their way through the crowd, bathing suits clearly visible under their thin wraparounds. It was all so different from the world I had left behind. The sounds, smells, sights were all foreign, but somehow I knew from those very first moments it was a world where I truly belonged.
I reached into the front pocket of my jeans and pulled out a folded piece of paper. My mother had written out the simple set of directions I would need to reach my grandmother's home.
I walked up Via Roma and made a sharp left just before the start of the steep hill that led to Saint Peter's Church. A quarter of the way into the narrow walkway, I turned right and took two steps down into a small square that had a stone wall on one side and three homes on the other. It was here, at the last house in the square, that I first saw my Italian grandmother, Maria Mattera Carcaterra.
She was wearing a widow's black blouse, long skirt, and black sandals. Her thick hair, rolled in the back into a circular bun, was as white as a cloud. She waited until I was at the base of the stairway and casually waved me up. She then turned and headed back into her home, walking with a slight limp favoring her right leg. I made it up the stairs and rested my bags in the foyer. The walls were made of stone and painted white, the large room dominated by a dining table and two small couches. There were two large framed photos on opposite walls, each encased in a thick old wooden frame. One I knew must be of my grandfather, Gabriel, clearly taken when he was a young man. Nonna Maria came out of the kitchen and looked at me. Her eyes were dark and penetrating but with a hint of mischief in them. She stepped closer to me and I reached out my right hand, ready to shake hers and kiss her on both cheeks, as I had been told was the customary way to greet friends and family. She ignored my outstretched hand and wrapped her arms around me, holding me close to her for several moments, neither one of us saying a word. She then kissed me on top of my head, held me for a few seconds longer, and relaxed her arms. "The bathroom is down the hall," she said in Italian, nodding tow...
