It begins, as these things do, on a ship — a six-year-old Sicilian boy crossing the Atlantic in 1919 with a sick mother and a rosary in his pocket. He became Joseph Cassaro, and he became the beginning of a family, and the family became, in time, the woman telling this story.
One Woman’s View is the warm, funny, unflinching memoir of a granddaughter of that crossing — an Italian-American girl from Auburn, New York, who inherited the food and the faith and the fierce family loyalty, came through the unthinkable and the broken road, and built a life her grandfather could never have imagined an ocean away, in an England of village lanes and white picket fences, beside the woman she loves.
By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, One Woman’s View is about family and food, grief and grace, and the roads that break us and the ones that carry us home. One woman’s story, told exactly as loudly as she lived it.
I grew up on my grandfather’s stories of Sicily and the ship that brought him over at six years old, travelling with his sick mother beside him. He talked about running around the ship alone. I have spent my own life on the other side of that same ocean, in England, and I write to keep both shores in the same room — the world he left, and the one he gave me the confidence to build.
— Donna Matthews
A memoir by Donna Matthews · Cassaro Publishing
ISBN 978-1-916919-55-6
In paperback
As an eBook — Apple Books, Kobo, Nook, Everand and more
Note: the memoir is One Woman’s View: A Life Lived Loudly; the blog is my ongoing One Woman’s View. Read the book · read the blog.
Donna Matthews 