Night Bloom: A Memoir by Mary CappelloBeacon Press, 1998

Family histories, family secrets, family gardens: a great-grandfather who had an affair, a grandfather who was a cobbler who gardened and wrote, a father who beats his two sons. Silences and gaps and a family transplanted, but also a family making things grow, planting hedges and flowers and herbs. In this book Cappello writes about her working-class Italian American family and their life, over decades, in Pennsylvania. She reads her grandfather’s journals, which her mother saved after his death, and is surprised by the grace co-existing with the struggle, how he wrote about the beauty of the sky on a certain day, even as he struggled to pay the gas and electric bills, even as he and his family were cold at home in fall and winter, in the rain and in the snow.

Cappello writes about her Catholic-school education, the strictures of it and the freedom she found in dancing, the culture of sin and confession (I love this: “I climb out of the confessional box. I am covered with confetti. I have nothing to confess. I have never had anything to confess” (184-185).) She writes about her own queerness and the idea that her whole family, culturally, was “queer,” immigrants on the edge of a country, of a culture. She writes about the solace of words, for herself and also for her family members: she writes about trips to the library with her agoraphobic mother, and about the letters her mother and her grandfather both wrote, “letters like lines strung with lanterns reaching toward some other” (67). Elsewhere, there’s this, which I find really satisfying: the writing reproduces in the reader the pleasure Cappello feels:

Snapdragons, if you press the hairy underside of their throats ever so gently, will speak. As a child, I wanted to eat every blossom in my father’s garden, until I learned the pleasure in my mouth of their names: calla lily, cosmos, rose eclipse, dahlia. As an adult, I keep The Field Guide to Wild Flowers on the same shelf with books of poems: “fragrant bedstraw,” “wild madder,” “grass-of-parnassus,” “night-flowering catchfly,” “ragged robin,” “shooting star.” (3)

Flowers appear over and over in this book: the buttercups a young Cappello brought home from an empty lot to plant in the garden, not knowing they were weeds; the lunaria (honesty, money plant) that Cappello’s father grew and dried and gave to his Sicilian family members; the Night-Blooming Cereus of the book’s title, flowering in her grandfather’s garden twenty years before she was born, another Night-Blooming Cereus blossoming, later, in her father’s garden, and cuttings from that plant blooming in her own house. This is a meditative memoir, a contemplative one: the person who read this book before me (I found my copy on the street) seems to have been frustrated by it: the marginal notes say things like “dull” or “show a scene” or “too much explanation.” While I wasn’t totally smitten with this book—its particular tones and lyricisms didn’t entirely resonate with me—I did enjoy it, including its slow pace.