In Slate's Book Review section, Maria Russo talks about Anna Quindlen's new book, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake. She criticized Quindlen's for her tone deft writing about her own wealth.
There is a bizarre chapter called “Stuff,” in which she enumerates all the things she has accumulated in her two homes—the brownstone in Manhattan and the country place in Pennsylvania: the samplers, the pottery, the four or five enamel colanders, all the way to the closet containing “eighteen pairs of black pants and eleven pairs of black pumps.” Finally she announces that “at a certain point … I realized that I don’t give a damn about any of it.” Is she going to give away some of her hoard to the less fortunate, maybe commit from here on in to practicing radical sustainability? Well, no. She just realizes that she could live without it all. In theory.
Russo is more sympathetic about Quindlen's discussion of the Irish-Italian community. Russo explains that Qindlen's nails Italian women in a way that Mob Wives does not. There been lots of hate directed at Quindlen over the years for her pro-motherhood messages. While Russo has issues with Quindlen's thoughtless privilege, she is very sympathetic to her portrayals of our tribe.
Since these are my people, this book review made me itchy to buy this book.
Apt. 11d 
There was never much of an Irish-Italian community where I was just. Just a bunch of Irish people married to Italian people but all from different areas. My Italian mother and all of her siblings who got married got married to someone Irish, but the Irish were all from very different areas.
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I once heard a nostalgic homily at the Pittsburgh cathedral, talking about growing up in the post-war era. The priest said something like, “All our parents were Irish married to Italians. And they fought all the time!”
I have one very domestic Irish-Italian SIL, a missionary for the gospel according to Martha Stewart. She has introduced my family to real maple syrup (heated!), an amazing coconut cream pie and she oversaw the repainting of my parents’ upstairs bedrooms and the re-flooring of their downstairs bathroom.
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You know, I would’ve guessed the Baldwin Bros. were Irish American based on their growing up in “Pequa Land,” as my friends and I always called it, but no, his mom isn’t Italian. Still, Alec played an awesome Long Island Italian in Married to the Mob.
Heh, was just looking up Massapequa and found this:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2001/08/15/AR2005033116174_pf.html
“The caricatures of Long Island are my heritage. I know from fugedaboudit. I was part of the blue-collar crowd. My dad, Tony Gulotta, was a printer at Newsday. My friends had fathers who were cops and firemen and mailmen. A couple of moms, including mine, had part-time jobs, but only during the hours their children were at school. I didn’t meet a kid whose dad wore a tie to work until the ninth grade.”
This was my world, too, except my dad was a teacher (he never wore a tie if he could help it). It’s a good reminder of how public service jobs were the backbone of the economy in New York for many years and are what contributed to the success of the area. Long Island schools still rock. I have a student in one of my classes from East Meadow HS (we’ve bonded :), not exactly a “flagship” LI school like Syosset or Great Neck North or Roslyn, and he’s one of the best writers in my class. And he was probably a middling student at EMHS. I always get quality from students from Long Island, no matter what school they went to.
Because of the high home prices in Long Island, people think Long Islanders must be rich, or old money, or something, but the fact is that what the generation of Long Islanders had for many years was far more simple: a basic middle class lifestyle. Enough to live on, but not enough to consume wildly. You had to watch your money, but you didn’t have to worry about whether you could pay your mortgage or rent. Bill O’Reilly grew up in my town, and when he’s not being his own unique brand of mentally ill con man, I can tell that he remembers what that world was like.
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I meant Irish-Italian. *facepalm*
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She criticized Quindlen’s for her tone deft writing about her own wealth.
I like “tone deft,” meaning well written, but making a banal or offensive point.
“Riley’s blog post of dissertation topics was racist trash, but Ron Paul’s arguments against the Civil Rights Act were more tone deft.”
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I don’t think that the sheer quantity of Quindlen’s stuff is a class marker. You can find lots of much poorer people in the US with homes choked with even more personal possessions (see Octomom, Hoarders, etc.). What undoubtedly distinguishes Quindlen is the quality, not the quantity.
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Anyway, the Italian side of my family is strange. They stop drinking after six drinks regardless of the occasion.
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Also, Italians like to talk about “feelings” but don’t view them as an issue that can be settled for once and for all. Instead, “feelings” keep coming back again and again. You can hardly go a five of years without telling somebody about your feelings before they get nosy.
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My poor grandma never figured out how to deal with all the Irish people and their expectation that everybody should just be able to guess how they were likely to be feeling.
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I’m so happy my sister married a Pollack so we can have somebody sane in the family.
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“My poor grandma never figured out how to deal with all the Irish people and their expectation that everybody should just be able to guess how they were likely to be feeling.”
That’s a very WASP feature, actually. I suppose that’s one of the reasons why Yale WASPs used to be in such demand as CIA recruits–their total inscrutability.
In general, you need to be most concerned when old-style WASPs are telling you that “X isn’t a problem”. That’s WASPese for “X is a BIG deal”. It’s taken me literally decades to translate this one correctly.
I get the feeling from film that non-WASPs have a hard time reading WASPs correctly. The impression you’d get from Hollywood is that there’s zero going on under that tranquil surface, whereas nothing could be further from the truth (see, for instance, Florence King’s “A Wasp Looks at Lizzie Borden: A Centennial Appreciation”).
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