The Closer We Are to Dying: A Memoir of Father and Family [Hardcover]

Joe Fiorito (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 3, 2000

In the 1950s in Fort William, Ontario, everyone knew Dusty Fiorito. He was handsome and hard and hot-tempered. A letter carrier, a small-town trombonist, an occasional crooner, and a heavy drinker, Dusty was both the keeper and maker of his Italian family’s many stories. At the end of his life, as Dusty lay dying in a hospital, Joe sat with him at night, listening one last time to the family legends. Rich and compelling, The Closer We Are to Dying is Joe Fiorito’s brilliant tribute to a complicated man and an affecting testament to the power of family ties.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"The more one remembers, the closer perhaps one is to dying." Joseph Brodsky's epigraph beautifully sums up Fiorito's memoir of his heavy-drinking and philandering father, an Ontario mailman and bandstand idol and the youngest of a large clan of heavy-drinking, promiscuous brothers. As Dusty Fiorito dies of cancer in a hospital bed, he and the author recall the vibrant, funny, sometimes ribald stories their unique Italian-Canadian family has told and retold over the years, an "endless ribbon of myth about our origins, the whisper of old murders and the tales of those who had died before I was born." Inevitably, some readers will draw a comparison to a certain Irish-American author's bestselling memoir of his hard-drinking father and hardscrabble boyhood, but Fiorito follows a very different narrative line and achieves a very different literary effect. Night after night, through the 21 nights Fiorito sits up with his father in the hospital, the two prepare each other for the older man's death through their exchange of memories and stories. One of the best, and funniestAin which Fiorito's grandfather pays back his brother for an insult by making him a gift of a "rabbit" that is really the skinned carcass of a catAis evoked with the brush of a fingertip across Dusty's upper lip and the single word meow whispered through closed teeth. Fiorito's unforced, unsentimental style strikes the perfect tone for his unusual mix of comedy and high emotion, stirring up a touching and effectively understated blend of family history, father-son friendship and personal passage from old anger and resentment into reconciliation and love. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Everyone in 1950s Fort William, Ont., knew Dusty Fiorito. A problem drinker, a mail carrier, an amateur trombonist and singer, the handsome and cruel Dusty enjoyed embellishing the family history. He particularly loved the implied menace in relaying the tale of his forefathers fleeing their native Italy for Canada after an impetuous murder. His son Joe, a journalist, loved his father's way of telling the family legends, but he never forgot Dusty's cruelty--the beating of his wife and children, his infidelities, and his selfishness with money. When Joe's mom called to tell him that Dusty was dying, he rushed to his father's bedside for a 21-day vigil that allowed him to hear the family stories as told by his father one last time. Here Joe recounts his father's life, giving the reader a bedside view of the ambivalent reconciliation between father and son. In death, as in life, Dusty Fiorito is a hard man to care about; his savagery and self-centered attitudes are not so much redeemed as reinforced by this memoir. Recommended for special Italian American or psychology collections.
-Pam Kingsbury, Florence, AL
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Picador; 1st edition (June 3, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312261365
• ISBN-13: 978-0312261368
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,509,024 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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