Italian Women in Black Dresses

This collection reads like a memoir, detailing the life of a family across generations and giving us a moving and haunting portrait of the Italian mother who is the centre around which this family revolves. The mother's stories and words shape the lives of her daughter and granddaughter, but this book is about much more than ethnicity. Gillan's work succeeds in transcending any single identity category and explores instead the multiple ways in which each of us learns to identify him or herself.