San Jose Magazine
Celebrating the Complexity of Womanhood
Heather Wax
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| "While death and humor have often been bedfellows, Gisonni's use of the comical, gleaned from growing up in a New York Italian family, adds candor to the work." |
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Debbie Gisonni's Vita's Will: Real Life Lessons about Life, Death & Moving On (Writers Club Press, 2000) lets you see all the passion, bravery and perseverance that, over 15 years, brought her book to fruition. The title is a daughter's tribute to the larger-than-life, gritty mother, who died at 60 after a 10-year battle with chronic disease and disability. Part memoir, part self-help, the book also chronicles the four-year period in which Gisonni's father, sister, favorite aunt and mother all died, and how Redwood City-based Gisonni later jumped off the Silicon Vally fast-track at the height of the Internet revolution to work on her story.
Readers expecting sorrow and self-pity should beware, however. While death and humor have often been bedfellows, Gisonni's use of the comical, gleaned from growing up in a New York Italian family, adds candor to the work. And Gisonni sprinkles her work not only with her own emotional torment and spirituality, but also 44 real life lessons that carefully signal her transformation and can help others stay sane through some of life's hardest changes.
May 2001 |
