Category: Autobiography

  • Chapter 4

    The Trinity When you’re young, it feels like you have to pick a specific model if you want to fit into ‘the system’. It’s as if life gives you all these tailored suits to choose from, each one representing a person you can choose to be, and a path you can take, according to the…

  • Chapter 2

    Running with the Wolf In a world where you start out with nothing and have nothing to aspire to, pragmatism trumps virtue ethics. Growing up in the Italian ghetto you learn to move in many different circles. That sequence in The Godfather sums it up: in one scene, Michael is in church, baptizing his nephew, in the…

  • Chapter 1

    My Parents and Early Life Minute by minute, I watched the slow arc of the sun as the light inched its way across the room. For eight hours, I watched it. In that time, I saw no one, spoke to no one, ate nothing. I was just 7-years old, and I sat there – alone…

  • Introduction

    It was a long time since I had set foot in a church, but the compulsion was irresistible. St Stephen’s Roman Catholic Church in Boston’s North End stood like a beacon, proud and defiant against the changing mores of life in Little Italy in the 1960s.  St Stephen’s had been my parish church, the place…