MEA CULPA

In this memoir, a man remembers an emotionally turbulent childhood and the long shadow it cast over his adult life.

Cocorocchio grew up in postwar Italy during the 1950s and ’60s in Sant’Elia Fiumerapido, not far from Rome, his world infused with the traumas of the suffering nation, a ruined cosmos sensitively described. The author and his family contended with austere financial hardship. They all lived in a two-room apartment that didn’t even have running water, forcing them to retrieve it from a fountain outside. Cocorocchio wilted both under the mercurial anger of his father and the guilt trips of his mother, the “Queen of Martyrs.” The author’s parents finally moved to Canada in 1964—his father was motivated less by an aspiration than a “deep desire to leave” Italy. But that fresh start did little to alleviate the perennial tension between Cocorocchio and his parents, an emotional conflict that burdened him his entire life but that he didn’t fully confront until he was a grown man: “I must have been in my forties when I first became aware of the yearning that had been festering inside me my whole life. A pining for some lost opportunity—to have been stillborn, and for my mother to have died while giving birth to me.” The author chronicles his story with admirable, even courageous candor—besides poverty and familial conflicts, he endured sexual abuse as a child, a string of failed marriages as an adult, and the heartbreaking loss of a daughter to cancer. But this is a deeply personal memoir, an emotionally painful chronicle that seems intended for those in Cocorocchio’s circle of friends and family; the remembrance concludes with a brief commentary from a psychiatrist. As intelligent and frank as this book genuinely is, it is too narrow to appeal to a broad readership.

An impressively forthcoming yet idiosyncratic recollection.