Love & Gelato

“How was it possible that someone who hadn’t even met me had managed to put together my perfect bedroom?”

The connection between Howard Mercer and Lina is not biological even though, for most of the book, Lina believes it is. Seeing her perfectly appointed bedroom, set up just for her by a man she’s never met, is her first indication that what ties her to Howard may be more than biology.

“I hated being called quiet. People always said it like it was some kind of deficiency—like just because I didn’t put everything out there right away, I was unfriendly or arrogant. My mom had understood. You may be slow to warm up, but once you do, you light up the whole room.”

The novel is the story of Lina’s coming of age. In that process, she moves away from her childhood identity as aloof, introspective, and unconnected. The experience in Italy opens her up to Howard, to her friends at the new school, to Ren, and ultimately to her mother.

“Patchwork hills stretched out into the distance and there were honest-to-goodness vineyards behind half the houses. So this was the Italy people were always talking about. No wonder people were always losing their minds over it.”

The novel suggests that there is something indefinably beautiful and romantic about the Italian countryside. Italy emerges as a kind of character in the novel. Here, Lina, raised in what she remembers as the often dreary, rainy environment of Seattle, first feels the charm of Italy.

“‘So what’s it like?’

‘What?’

‘Losing your mom?’”

When Lina shares with Ren the circumstances of why she came to be staying with Howard, Ren intuits Lina’s pain over her mother’s death. Here, he evidences empathy and encourages Lina to share her grief with him.

“Most of the main floor windows were stained glass with swirling peppermint patterns, and there was a giant candy cane carved into the front door. In other words, picture the most ridiculous house you can imagine and then add a bunch of lollipops.”

The novel utilizes the imagery and ambience of a fairy tale when Lina first visits Ren’s home. The curious house reminds Lina of the witch’s cottage in the story of Hansel and Gretel, a warning that Lina needs to be wary and alert. There is danger in this fairy tale, which emerges in the characters of Thomas Heath and Matteo Rossi.

“Did Italian food have some kind of fairy dust that made it way better than its American counterparts?”

Italy is used as a symbol in the novel for all kinds of sensory pleasures—the idyllic countryside, the quaint villages, the beautiful cities, the fashion, the wine, and, here, the food. For Lina, everything about Italy appeals to a decadent sense of luxury and sweetness.

“Before today I’d known exactly who my mother was, and she certainly wasn’t this woman who loved violets or sent her daughter mysterious journals or forgot to tell the father of her child that—oh, by the way, you have a daughter.”

Lina begins to see that the mother she knew back in Seattle, the mother of her childhood, is not the whole of who Hadley Emerson was. She finds out right away that her mother grew flowers in Florence, which she never did in Seattle; that her mother sent a journal to her friend Sonia to give to Lina; and that she never told Howard he had a child. This tipping-point moment indicates that in uncovering the truth of her mother’s past, Lina has begun her own Journey to Self-Discovery.

“I made the wrong choice.”

Hadley writes these words on the inside cover of her journal before she mails it to Sonia. She wants both Howard and her daughter to understand that she recognizes—too late—that in not choosing Howard, not choosing love, she made the wrong choice. This inscription lets Howard know he was the right choice and eventually guides Lina to choose Ren over Thomas.

“I sprinted down the board, bouncing high and tucking into the world’s most perfect cannonball. I felt the most alive I had in more than a year. Maybe ever.”

Reserved and shy for most of her high school years, Lina responds with uncharacteristic energy under the influence of the friendly kids from what could be her new school. Fully clothed, she jumps into the pool at the end-of-summer party, the initiation for new kids at the school. This moment indicates Lina’s larger emotional arc: coming back to life, emerging from the trauma of her mother’s death.

“I swear Ponte Vecchio was glowing even brighter and more regal. It gave me a solemn, awestruck kind of feeling. Like going to church. Only I want to stay here for the rest of my life.”

The Medieval bridge, Ponte Vecchio, one of Florence’s most storied tourist spots, reveals to Lina what her mother, a photographer, learned when she was there. The city speaks in a language of beauty and magic to those willing to listen. The feeling here for Lina is akin to religious awe and the first indication Lina might be willing to extend her stay beyond the summer.

“One of you will find love. Both of you will find heartache.”

The psychic’s message, which adds a touch of supranatural mysticism to Lina’s summer trip, is remarkably on point. In her movement toward the reassuring and comforting love and emotional support of Ren, Lina does in fact find love, and in the story of her mother’s painful relationship with Matteo and regret over leaving Howard, she will find the meaning of heartache.

“Then something crazy happened. The music was so loud it was like it was pounding and rattling through my bones and teeth and everyone was having such a good time and suddenly I was Dancing. Like actually dancing. And actually having fun.”

“Something crazy happened”—that sums up Lina’s experience of Italy, whether it be her discovery of Howard, finding love with Ren, or even the gorgeous landscapes of Tuscany and the delight of gelato. The experience of Italy registers as a real, visceral, physical jubilation, an opening up to new things, new feelings, and new experiences. After months of being her mother’s caregiver and grieving her death, Italy allows her the chance to have fun.

“There was a reason Howard didn’t know about the secret bakery or the significance of Giambologna’s statue, and why my mom had slipped up and called him by his real name. He wasn’t X.”

This moment begins Lina’s difficult Journey to Self-Discovery as she reckons with painful elements of her mother’s past. She had tried without success to connect the X in her mother’s journal to the quiet Howard. Howard is supportive, gentle, caring, and selfless in love. Matteo Rossi, the real X, is none of those things. This realization catalyzes Lina’s search for her biological father.

“It’s about how whenever you fall in love with someone it turns out they’re in love with someone else. And it’s this big messed-up cycle where no one ends up with the people they want.”

This formula for romance describes her mother’s tragedy, her decision to run from Howard to protect her unborn child from their selfish father. It nearly describes Lina’s uncertainty over the relationship between Ren and Mimi. The narrative present allows Lina to break this cycle of tragedy.

“I snuck a glance back at him, pity welled up in me so fast it almost overflowed from my eyeballs. He’d loved my mom. Was it too much to ask that she just love him back?”

Lina initially pities Howard, left alone for nearly 20 years to tend a cemetery and live haunted by the ghost of a lost love. But through his resilient character and his loving heart, Lina comes to admire and care for him instead. His love is constant, secure, and unconditional. As Lina will find out, her mother very much wants her daughter to know that yes, she did love Howard back. A relationship with Howard, a man Hadley knows will be a good father to her daughter, is her final gift to Lina.

“A black and white head shot of Matteo loaded and I leaned in to take a look. That’s when I stopped breathing.”

Here, biology reveals to Lina the truth of her father’s identity. That she resembles Matteo Rossi so closely, however, does not mean she will be like him. In a novel that argues that a person’s worth is found in their character, not their appearance, Lina will come to reject her biological father’s selfishness, embracing Howard as her father and pursuing romance with Ren.

“I don’t know how to explain it exactly, but for years I’ve felt like I was looking for something—like I wasn’t quite in the right place. But here with Howard, that feeling has evaporated…I’ve never felt more at ease.”

Howard is not Lina’s biological father, but unlike Lina, he has already known that reality for nearly 20 years and still welcomes her with love and unconditional support, which speaks to the quality of his character.

“She was a stupid child, in love with her instructor […] when she got here she thought her life would be transformed into some sort of fairy tale […] I was her teacher, nothing more.”

This conversation with Lina’s biological father is, perhaps, the most cutting and traumatic event in her life after the death of her mother. This conversation reveals the heartlessness, cruelty, and chilling egotism of Matteo Rossi. It’s a moment in which Lina both learns her identity and decides biology is not the defining factor of her identity. Her biological father becomes instead a cautionary tale.

“It was throw-your-arms-around-his neck-bury-your-fingers-in-his-hair, why-haven’t you-done-this-before kissing straight through all the salt of my face.”

The first kiss between Ren and Lina is both simple and complicated—simple because Lina feels the truth of her love for Ren and feels the physical, emotional, and spiritual depth of her feelings but complicated because she believes that Ren is committed to Mimi, a relationship that recalls her mother’s affair as recounted in her journal.

“I was so in love it hurt. I pressed my fingers into my chest. You’ve known him like five days. There’s no way you can be in love with him. Totally rational. Totally not true. Of course I was in love with Ren.”

Trying to put into words the wonderful chaos of falling in love defines Lina’s confused reaction to her feelings for Ren. This passage reflects the back-and-forth as her heart argues with her brain. Of course, this cannot be love, and of course it is. Now she must make the choice her mother did not make.

“‘If you could photograph anything in the world, what would it be?’ Before I could even think about it, I blurted out, ‘Hope.’”

Young Hadley’s answer to Young Howard’s question foreshadows her daughter’s story 17 years later. Hope is, in the end, what her journal ultimately gives to Lina. Lina comes to Italy grieving deeply, indifferent to what tomorrow might bring. The journal, coupled with falling for Ren, gifts Lina with what her mother most longed for, what she hopes her death does not destroy: hope. The closing line of the novel affirms that Hadley’s plan works.

“I didn’t get to stop missing her. Ever. It was the thing that my life had handed me, and no matter how heavy it was, I was never going to be able to set it down. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to be okay. Or even happy…right at this moment I was standing on a tower in the middle of Tuscany and the sunrise was so beautiful it hurt.”

This epiphany marks Lina’s full-circle moment of coming to terms with her loss. The response is balanced and mature and reveals her understanding that the loss of her mother will always be part of who she is but that the last thing her mother would want is for her death to destroy her daughter’s hope and sense of joy in her own life. Here Lina reclaims the right to be happy, a critical phase in any adjustment to loss.

“We kissed. Like really, really kissed. And it turns out I’d been waiting absolutely my entire life to be kissed by Lorenzo Ferrara in an American cemetery in the middle of Italy. You’re just going to have to trust me on that one.”

Throughout the novel, both narrators give the reader constant commentary on their stories—Hadley through her journal and Lina through her first-person narration. But, at this pivotal moment where Lina at last finds love, words gloriously fail, proving some things in life are beyond words.