Louise DeSalvo is a writer, professor, lecturer, and scholar who lives in New Jersey. Her many books include the memoirs Vertigo, Breathless, and Adultery; the acclaimed biography Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on her Life and Work; and Writing as a Way of Healing. Recently, she edited Woolf’s early novel Melymbrosia and coedited The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture.

In Louise DeSalvo’s family, in 1950s New Jersey, the kitchen becomes the site for fierce generational battle. As Louise’s step-grandmother stubbornly recreates the domestic habits of her Southern Italian peasant upbringing, she clashes painfully with Louise’s convenience-food-loving mother, who is set on total Americanization. Louise, meanwhile, dreams of the day when in her own kitchen she’ll produce perfect fresh pasta or pan-seared pork chops with fennel. But as Louise grows up to indulge in the kind of amazing food her impoverished ancestors could never have imagined and travels to Italy herself, her adult discoveries give her new insight into the tensions of her childhood. In unearthing the oppressive conditions that led Southern Italians to emigrate en masse to the United States, gaining a subtler understanding of the struggles between her parents and their parents, and starting a more happily food-obsessed family of her own, Louise DeSalvo arrives at a fuller and more compassionate picture of her own roots. And, in the process, she reveals that our image of the festive and bounteous Italian-American kitchen may exist in part to mask a sometimes painful history.

Praise for Vertigo: A Memoir (winner of the Gay Talese Award for best Italian-American book 1993-1997):
“Riveting… astonishing… The writing is terrific.” —Los Angeles Times

“Gripping.” —Kirkus Reviews

“A brave, heart-wrenchingly honest and utterly un-put-down-able memoir. Young Louise DeSalvo leaps from the pages in all her brightness and brashness." —Robert Cormier, author of The Chocolate Wars