Becoming Mariella

For fans of Elena Ferrante’s The Lying Life of Adults and Jean Kwok’s Girl in Translation comes a contemporary coming-of-age tale about a young Italian immigrant’s desperate journey to find her personal freedom.

It’s unprecedented, even in the twenty-first century, for a young Sicilian woman to defy the centuries-old mandate, ＂Family is everything!＂--but twenty-two-year-old Mariella Russo is desperate to escape Sicily. She’s being relentlessly coerced into an engagement with her wealthy college sweetheart--a young man from a prominent, powerful family--by her envious and erratic mother, who hopes the match will increase her own ignominious social status. Suddenly, Mariella’s lifelong home has become a claustrophobic island. In a bid for independence and an attempt to escape entrapment, she flees to San Francisco.

But Mariella’s bête noire--entrapment--follows her to San Francisco, where everyone wants more from her than she wants to give. Her American roommate, Leslie, turns out to be a gay man rather than the woman she imagined; her employer/lover is pressuring her to live with him; and her neurotic mother is haunting her, wreaking havoc and embarrassment. An urgent return trip to Sicily puts Mariella to the ultimate challenge: will she submit to tradition, or choose a life she wants for herself?

Janet Constantino is a former a competitive Latin Ballroom dancer and journalist, and has been a licensed psychotherapist since 1983. In 2015, she earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University, and in 2021, she won second place in the MFK Fisher Last House writing contest. A practicing Buddhist, Janet has a grown son and twin granddaughters. She and her husband of twenty-five years live in the beautiful city of Sonoma, California, with their beloved Labradoodle and tuxedo cat.