I Love You Like a Tomato began as a short story about a brother and sister growing up as southern Italian immigrants in northeast Minneapolis.

The short story won first prize in a writing contest and I was so encouraged I didn't let the story end, but kept on writing it. I couldn't stop writing about these two children, their mother, family, their lives and plight. I was hooked. The story became a novel.

The enforced closeness of the two children through environmental displacement as well as their hostile home situation developed into three challenges for me: (1) a psychological inquiry into displaced behavior; (2) a universal metaphorical separateness and management of estrangement; and (3) issues of betrayal and lies in a family, which I think is the overriding theme in the book. Another underlying theme of physical limitation or illness, situations which cannot be changed and are ongoing, follows in a thread throughout the novel. I was challenged to make literary sense of these themes because I see these characters and their story as representing more than their Italian ethnicity and place.

I wanted to transfer to the page the love between brother and sister, and their almost futile struggle to survive in a world that essentially had canceled them out as worthless. As I wrote, I discovered ChiChi and Marco to be funny and bright and great company.

I'm asked if I Love You Like a Tomato is autobiographical, and though it is written in first person and in part autobiographical, it is, in the main, a work of fiction. I am of part Italian, I speak Italian, and I was born in Minneapolis and lived in northeast and southeast Minneapolis. I've used family stories and research as well as my own life in the book.

When I was in Praiano researching my book I was climbing the mountainside, and there, abandoned in weeds and olive trees, was an old stone house. I realized I had found the house where my characters were born and immediately felt their presence around me. I could hear the murmur of chickens, the chatter of Tuzza the goat, and I smelled the basilico, the rosemary, the donkey dung. I pulled out my notebook and pen from my backpack and sat on the crumbling steps to write. I could hear Nonna calling the children in for pranzo, I could imagine the aunts setting down their water buckets, and ChiChi on the steps with me. I was living inside my novel! Though my actual family is from further south in Sicily, I placed my story here in this mountain village by the sea because my characters did not leave this home to advance their lives, or "to follow the bread" as the expression went -- they left for love.

And when
that love is betrayed
is when the story
takes wing...