Arrivederci Mama documents the troubled childhood of its narrator, and contextualizes it in the mosaic-styled stories of its women- the immigrant grandmother, the dying mother, and the narrator in various stages of life as struggling student and mother. This work finds its center in its economical prose, its acute studies of these people, and its structure. Its sequence of chapters shifts through time and place, juxtaposing a handful of imagined narratives of women relatives in Italy with stories of the narrator\u27s own trials; contrasting the innocence of her friends\u27 existences with her many early responsibilities and the cutting realizations of her own growing up.
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