COME ON DOWN!

A daughter learns to accept, and even cherish, her loving mother’s foibles in this memoir.

Tunno’s mother, Mary, loved three things in life—her husband, her kids, and the CBS game show The Price Is Right—and the way her daughter tells it, maybe not necessarily in that order. Mary was born in the United States in 1913, but her Italian mother took her and her sister back to Italy when she was a baby. Years later, they returned to Pennsylvania to reunite with her father (whose nickname for Mary was “crude Neapolitan slang meaning ‘big ass’”). Twelve-year-old Mary struggled in school and eventually quit to help her mother at home. At 27, after a life of feeling unloved, Mary married a man she’d only known a short while and had five children with him, the first of whom died as an infant. Tunno speculates that these painful experiences informed her mother’s parenting; Mary made sure her children were well fed and always told them that they could do anything they set their minds to. She was “determined to prove to [her parents] and everyone else that she was someone.” When a friend scoffed at her dream of being a contestant on The Price Is Right, she became more determined than ever to do it. Tunno uses phoneticized dialect for her mother’s speech (“Aaaaaaay, ha come a you don’t come a when I call a you? What’s a matta . . . you deef?”), which won’t appeal to all readers, but it’s used sparingly. As a child, the author often found her mom embarrassing, but she never doubted her affection for her and her siblings; each chapter fondly ends with a family recipe, including one with the note, “Mom made these from leftover pie-crust scraps. We LOVED them! They make every child feel special.” Throughout, Tunno does a great job of portraying her mother as a vibrant, real person, and by the end, readers will surely be cheering Mary on when she hears The Price Is Right’s announcer, Johnny Olson, say the three words she’d been waiting for: “Come on down!”

A sweet recollection of motherly love.