Authors Electric

So I’ve been conspicuously absent from this blog – and life in general for a few months. If 2023 was the year of health and getting my teeth done, then 2024 has so far been the year of death and the major life-changes that death brings to those of us left behind.  In January I lost my dad after a long, and slow decline into dementia. He’d been existing (I don’t use the term living, because he really wasn’t) for 18 months in a lovely care home, but passed away quietly in his sleep one night – a week before my 60th birthday and the party I’d planned.  My mum was in hospital at the time – she’d been admitted after some blood tests – and we didn’t realise then that she’d never live on her own again. After a terminal cancer diagnosis, she was in and out of hospital, respite care, her own home with carers 3 times a day (and me living with her on and off) and then she declined rapidly over a period of days and was suddenly gone. Overnight. No real goodbyes. My adult daughter and I sp...

I’ve never been a ‘foodie’, defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as ‘a  person  who  loves   food  and is very  interested  in different  types  of  food ’, let alone any type of gourmet or epicure. I once traumatized my closest friend in my early teens by saying I’d be happy enough to live on food pills. I had read and watched a lot of science fiction in which the shiny folk of the future (this was the 1970s and 1980s when the iconic year 2000 was still a long way off) wouldn’t waste precious leisure time cooking and would simply knock back a couple of pills to keep themselves going while conquering new worlds. ( Soylent Green hadn’t penetrated my consciousness at that point.) My friend recently reminded me of that – in her eyes – faux pas. Food had always been important to her and her family, whereas I was brought up on a typical British working-class family diet for that time: meat and two veg, always potatoes, a roast on Sunda...

I’m sitting here today contemplating the desolation of an empty nest. That may be something of an exaggeration, if I’m being honest. For my elder sister, it perhaps isn’t: she’s been a parent for thirty years, and this summer saw the last of her three children leaving home (to move 500 miles away), along with both his wedding and that of his sister, only six weeks apart. Months of frenetic preparations, book-ended by major family celebrations (and with the arrival of a new grandchild to the third sibling in the midst of everything), and then she and her husband find themselves alone in the anti-climactic aftermath, in the now-too-big family home, waiting for the next time the loved-up newlyweds deign to think of calling in… In my case, it will only be a part-time empty nest, a transitional stage that hopefully will prepare me gradually for what is to come later – that time when it’s just me, my partner and the dog (and maybe still the elderly cat) in the house. Ev...

It is the season for families and feasting; and for some of us, the season to catch up on books we've wanted to read through the year but never did. Which is how I -- FINALLY -- read Olive Kitteridge by the fabulous Elizabeth Strout .  This is a book that won the Pulitzer Prize and is now an HBO miniseries. It interlinks short stories around the central character of Olive Kitteridge, a female curmudgeon whom the reader meets at various stages of her life, as seen through different eyes. Olive is wonderfully nuanced as a character, as are the rest of the cast.  This is also a season of forced jollity and family tensions and this book, by making us empathise with a misanthrope, is a master class on how to love the people in our lives, warts and all.  My favourite story was "Security", and as Olive grapples with parenting mistakes and a grown-up son, the story is excruciatingly painful and heartwarming at the same time.  The message driven home by this b...

1914 Illustration for James Joyce's The Dead by William Bock Every year around Easter my great uncle Augusto on my mother's side would break out a barrel of his homemade wine from the previous year, or maybe two. He would pass a decanter of his deep maroon brew around the table for everyone to taste at one of the multi-course, extended family feasts that my mother and her sister would prepare on most Sunday afternoons during my early childhood years in 1940s Boston, Massachusetts. Even the kids got a spoonful or two of it diluted in a jelly glass of water-turned-pale-fuschia. The vaguely strange, metallic taste of diluted wine recalls all of this for me with Proustian sensuality even today. " Buona per il sangue " (Good for the blood), Zio Augusto would say. " Buono, Zio Augusto! Buono, buono! Delizioso! " My mother, Alba, her sister Nina, and two brothers, Aldo and Vincent, along with aunts and various cousins would all tell him, trying to look ple...

Christmas is all about tradition, isn’t it?  And ever since I had to give in to my in-laws’ edict that presents were opened  after lunch (outrageous!) I’ve clung on for dear life to the remnants of my Yuletide habits.  So on Christmas Eve, while the family settled down to Cool Runnings or Home Alone , I’d be in spendid isolation in the kitchen, soaking up the traditional beauty of Carols from Kings - most likely with my hand up a turkey's backside. Yes, for me Hark the Herald is synonymous with an oniony tear in my eye. Oh well, it's traditional. Long before Christmas Eve, I'd be chuntering on about how the sideboard was constantly littered with bits of tin-foil and cardboard, and how advent calendars were meant to be about the nativity. When we got more space I insisted on only ever having a calendar WITHOUT CHOCOLATE ( not an easy thing to find let me tell you.) Selection boxes on the other hand were fine. We had them every year. They were traditional. ...

My father, Renzo and I in Boston, c. 1941 My father, shows up this time of year, visiting my intermittently lit memories in the same way that he drifted in and out of my childhood with his bag of contradictions. Renzo Argentino Tosi would be 100 on June 9. Then there's Father's Day , third Sunday in June – still a Mother's Day greeting-card afterthought when I was a kid. I always gave him ties. He disdained gifts and the commercial sentimentality of holidays, but loved festive gatherings – big family dinners, Italian-American picnics . Plus he was an inveterate skinflint – also a narcissist with empathic talent. He was a successful businessman who scorned the financial system as a con. Life was a game of one one-upmanship most of the time – whether in relationships or playing golf or dominoes (which he loved.) He was a misogynist who admired women of substance, attracted to strong-willed women with whom he had stormy relationships. He was pro civil rights and an...