PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:

Few events exude as much joy as a wedding, and for the Pirellis these ceremonies mean even more. Pirelli weddings are about tradition and family - or at least they used to be. When Joseph Pirelli married Matthew, it rocked the clan to its knees. Now a year later, the tensions between different family factions have turned Maria's special day into a powder keg. And poor Frankie, Joseph's outspoken brother, is holding the match.

(preview | official Maria's Wedding webpage)


AUTHORS' COMMENTS:

[Nunzio] This book was the toughest I've ever worked on in some ways. The events in the book are inspired by/partially based on events that occurred in my family. When it came out, I felt this huge sense of accomplishment. Here I had set out to tell this tale of how this turmoil in my family made me want to do something, to fix my family. And I wrote this book that basically said, you can't. You can't fix family. You just accept them or you just deal with them or you just suffer through them. It was a huge thing for me, the realization that I couldn't fix things, make the problems my brother and brother-in-law faced go away. I was expecting that, if they ever read it, the members of the family who rejected my brother would be offended. I was prepared for that. Instead, my parents were angry I'd put some truth about those people into the book. They were upset that I had written something that ran the risk of bringing old family feuds back to the forefront. But the reaction that wiped me out, that made it hard for me to pitcure myself writing anything with any autobiographical content, was my brother's reaction. He was angry I had co-opted his story. He was angry I wrote a story where I was the one who got to 'save the day.' He totally missed the point - that the character based on me couldn't save the day, even if he wanted to. The fact that I was the lead, and that parts of the truth were changed to suit that fact - that was enough for him. I had betrayed him by taking an important, crucial conflict in his life and distorting it. I was stunned by his response, and may never truly get over it. I try to be proud of the book, nonetheless. I still love how it came out. But there are times I wish I'd never decided we should write it.

[Christina] As Nunzio said, the book is partially autobiographical. Many, many years ago before Nunzio and I started writing together (before we were even dating), he wrote a version of Maria's Wedding as a screenplay. I remember reading it. It was a great window into his family. And then I remember one very long night when we were doing a road trip to Oregon to visit good friends of ours. It was a twelve hour drive from Los Angeles to Eugene and it was two in the morning and I was tired. (Nunzio doesn't drive so I'd been at the wheel for many hours). I was getting a little loopy and having a hard time staying awake so Nunz started quizzing me on the members of his extended family. There are a LOT of them. I kept using Maria's Wedding as reference to try to remember them all. My biggest fear when I first met some of the members of his extended family is that I would call them by their fictional names! The book was a lot of fun to work on, though there was always a fear with this particular project that I had to hold back on some of my thoughts and notes because it was such a personal project for Nunzio. Ultimately, I suppose my point of view and input was good because it helped keep the story in the realm of fiction and not too bogged down in reality. Though given some of the family response we got, maybe that was a bad thing. Who knows?