bring a book to my bed and insist I read it to her. There were not too many words inside. Sometimes she’d fall asleep right away, but when she didn’t, I would make up stories for her. (99–100) This passage foregrounds the triviality of the words themselves and suggests that the significance of storytelling between generations of women lies in the sense of connection it fosters. When the speaker learns to read in English and rejects partaking in the shared psychological space defined by soap operas, her mother brings books to her and asks to join her in a new space. However, unlike the stories told by Patriarca’s mothers and daughters, the children’s picture books and made-up stories are not founded on shared experience or collective memory. The speaker’s schooling eventually reveals that the psychological spaces she and her mother chiefly occupy no longer overlap: “We were different people, and we understood that then” (102). This results in McLeod’s notion of ideological exile, in which the stories told do not belong to a “spatial, temporal home,” and neither the mother nor the daughter are ideologically home (McLeod 172). Ultimately, the diasporic generations of women in Patriarca’s Italian Women and Other Tragedies and Thammavongsa’s How to Pronounce Knife embody essential aspects of feminine diasporic identity. Defined by mother-daughter relationships, “Mother Tells Me Stories,” “For Grandma in Bed, Waiting,” “Edge of the World,” and “You Are So Embarrassing” explore the way mothers and daughters inform each other’s diasporic experiences through the domestic space, their mother tongue, and storytelling, albeit to different ends. Patriarca’s women ultimately reconcile, and Thammavongsa’s women come apart.
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