ABSTRACT
My father was estranged from his family and not much of a storyteller anyhow, so I grew up feeling that my real cousins, aunts, and uncles were the Bongiornos. In fact the extended family was more compelling to me as both an idea and an entity than my immediate family, which seemed in comparison rather meager in both number and spirit. My sister and I were our parents’ only children. In real families— the family my mother grew up in—there were lots of children.
