Swimming in the Moon: A Novel (43 page)

This book also touches on the issue of mental illness and explores the attitudes and treatments of that time. Indeed, the early scene with the spinning chair is quite horrifying. What were you most surprised to learn in your research?

Psychology was a young science a century ago, neurological research just beginning, and the only pharmaceuticals available for treating mental illness were varieties of opiates, like the laudanum Teresa uses. Sigmund Freud’s brilliant, exciting explorations of the unconscious couldn’t help practitioners with wards full of patients who were too poor to pay a psychotherapist or whose illness didn’t permit talk therapy.

I first learned of the terrible treatment of the mentally ill in America while working on a fifth-grade social studies report grandly titled “The History of Mental Illness, by Pamela Schoenewaldt.” But my school library sources had not elaborated the degree to which ignorance linked with ingenious sadism, sheer brutality, and perversion. My Dr. Galuppi is fictional, but his “treatments” were real enough in both Europe and America. Treatment worsened (if possible) when patients were lower class, poor, or female; didn’t speak English; had other handicaps; or were simply inconvenient. Of course, compassionate, thoughtful professionals like Dr. Ricci did their dedicated best, and some sanitariums offered healing care to those with means, but too many public institutions were as I described or worse, closed away from public oversight, overcrowded, underfunded, understaffed, brutal, filthy, and unsafe. Lucia was right to fear them.

The forced sterilization that Teresa endured was tragically common. As immigrants poured in, newspapers, public officials, and academics began warning of “germ plasma” infecting good American stock with genetic material prone to insanity, imbecility, indigence, and promiscuity. “Scientific proof” was summoned and delivered. The solution: sterilize the undesirable “deficients.” As one medical historian noted, it’s easy to be shocked and scornful of this conflation of racism and pseudoscience, but it remains to be seen how a century’s experience will judge our current practices.

As you wrote, did any of the characters take the story in directions that surprised you, or did you keep them fully in line?

Although I work out the overall plot before starting to write and begin each chapter with an outline, there are always discoveries and inventions. In successive revisions, one character begins to shape another and hence the plot. For example, Enrico’s enthusiastic involvement in the strike deepens Lucia’s relationship with him and hence her anguish at his death. Her friendship with Irena, her first true girlfriend, leads to Lucia’s discovery that fluency in the same language isn’t essential for intimacy; perhaps this experience gives her faith that a mixed marriage can be, in her word, “negotiated.” I’m not sure at what point in the writing process I saw Lucia and Teresa walking to Vesuvius in Lake Erie. It wasn’t in my original outline, and, yes, that direction certainly surprised me. I’m glad they returned.

The process of novel writing is a constant push and pull of the global and the local, the controlling needs of plot versus the outward push of character. Too much freedom for each character would shred the novel into a series of possibly vivid but less connected sketches, while slavish devotion to a predetermined plot strangles the very characters whose facets, evolution, and contradictions are the soul of any story.

Your characters always feel so layered and real. Do personalities of loved ones or people you’ve known and met ever find their way into your writing?

My first experience of the devastation of mental illness came when I was seventeen and my boyfriend suffered a schizophrenic collapse. One week he was himself, charming, witty, kind, brilliant, and so forth (first love, I was quite smitten). The next week he was incoherent, coarse, delusional, and grotesquely childlike. He was nobody I knew. Like Lucia, I found the shock horrific: What warnings had I missed? Was the mind truly that fragile? Who else in my life might collapse without warning? Could it happen to me? I’m sure my telling of Teresa’s collapse was influenced by my own experience.

However, all the characters of
Swimming in the Moon
were inventions, even those loosely based on real people, like the union leaders Isadore Freith and Josephine Carey. It would seem logical that narrative arts are rooted in one’s own experience, but in practice it seems to me that most of the layers come from looking into the scene, going over and over the material, seeing and adding more, realizing depths and limitations. My fictional Josephine, for example, probably isn’t capable of Lucia’s depth of intimate relationships; perhaps her organizational effectiveness comes in part from her emotional distance. Yolanda’s friendship has its limits, Lula’s bluntness masks a delicate compassion, and Mr. Weiss has a larger heart than his son at first realized.

Your husband is Italian and you lived near Naples for many years. Do you ever find yourself yearning for the oversize lemons, fresh mozzarella, and sun of Naples? What about your experience, if anything, made its way into this story?

Of course, I miss much of our life near Naples. It’s hard not to. The beauty, the complex history, cuisine, language, art, and customs there are a world away from our current home of Knoxville, Tennessee. Out of nowhere come memories of sunset over the Mediterranean seen from our kitchen window, the coastline and islands, the Baroque intensity of the city, moonlight on medieval castles by the sea, hikes and city walks and long dinners with friends. Yet, in the ten years I lived outside of Naples, most of my writing had American settings. Writing about my adopted country on such short acquaintance seemed presumptuous. Time and distance have made this setting possible for me, as have the measured permissions of the historical fiction genre.

Yet, there is much in today’s Naples that Lucia would recognize. The Palazzo Donn’Anna has been made into apartments and noble titles are officially abolished, but the fish markets still thrive, and you can buy gelato at Caffè Gambrinus as Teresa and Lucia were sent to do. We lived for several months in a
basso
across a narrow basalt-paved street from a mattress-maker. When the power went out, as it often did, the inner room was cave-dark. You can still buy
mozzarella di bufala
made that morning, an exquisite delight like no other. On summer days in Knoxville, what I miss most are the lemon salads that we (and Nannina) made. Try one yourself if you come upon big, sweet, thick-skinned lemons. Peel off the rind, squeeze out a bit of juice, and chop the flesh in bite-size pieces. Add some good olive oil and mix in black salted olives. Enjoy and be refreshed.

Reading Group Guide

  1.  Lucia and Teresa’s life in Naples had its advantages and challenges. In what ways would Lucia’s life have been different if she and Teresa weren’t forced to leave?

  2.  When they leave Italy, Lucia and Teresa are told: “You can be who you want to be in America.” True?

  3.  How does the immigrant experience today compare with that described in
Swimming in the Moon
? Are there other ways in which we are “immigrants” besides the literal moving to a new country?

  4.  Lucia has a deep emotional connection with Irena, even though they do not share language fluency. What does this say about Lucia and, more generally, about the way that people from different cultures can connect?

  5.  Lucia earns money by “scribing,” writing letters for fellow immigrants. In the process, she often passes on what are essentially lies about their lives. Why? Lucia also lies to the countess in her letters. Why?

  6.  What sets Lucia apart from the other immigrants in her neighborhood? What do you think Lula means when she says that Lucia “wants so much”? Have you ever felt that you wanted more than you were supposed to want?

  7.  Teresa’s absence while she is on the vaudeville circuit and her emotional and mental problems deprive Lucia of a sustaining maternal figure and ultimately make Lucia her mother’s caretaker. How does Lucia compensate for this loss?

  8.  In America, Lucia’s thoughts often return to her life in Naples. What various functions do you think these memories fulfill as she comes to adulthood?

  9.  How does Teresa’s beautiful voice both divide her from and bind her to Lucia? What does the voice do—and not do—for Teresa? How does Lucia develop her own voice?

10.  What challenges do workers in the novel face? How do they compare with those facing workers today?

11.  What factors drive Lucia to take up the issue of workers’ rights so passionately and endure so many sacrifices for the strike, even when the worker community is often bitterly divided?

12.  Lucia learns that only eight in one hundred Americans in her time have high school diplomas. Far fewer, of course, went to college. Graduation has a variety of meanings for Lucia. Can you discuss some of them? Yet, toward the end of the novel, formal education becomes less crucial. Why?

13.  What draws Lucia and Henryk together? What pulls them apart? Compare their evolving relationship with that of other couples in the novel: Elisabetta and Paolo, the Reillys, Yolanda and Charlie, Giovanna and Frank.

14.  Lucia vividly recalls a line from John Milton’s
Paradise Lost
: “The mind is its own place and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” How does this line relate to Lucia and Teresa’s circumstances—and to all of our lives?

15.  While the past century has brought profound changes in the treatment of mental illness, in what way is Teresa and Lucia’s experience timeless?

16.  What is the significance of the title,
Swimming in the Moon
? What image does it conjure for you?

17.  Why did you or your group choose to read
Swimming in the Moon
? What did you take away from reading the novel?

Read On

Suggested Reading

H
ERE ARE SOME BOOKS
I’ve read recently (although not all were written recently) in which the beauty and power of the voice seemed wonderfully honed for the stories they told:

My Father’s Notebook,
by Kader Abdolah

Little Bee,
by Chris Cleave

Peace Like a River,
by Leif Enger

Good King Harry,
by Denise Giardina

Plainsong,
by Kent Haruf

The Remains of the Day,
by Kazuo Ishiguro

Mister Pip,
by Lloyd Jones

Strength in What Remains,
by Tracy Kidder

Humphry Clinker,
by Tobias Smollett

The Space Between Us,
by Thrity Umrigar

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