Daughters of Stone and Tide: Loss and Resilience in a Fisherman’s Family (9781625349569): Maria "Mia" Millefoglie and Maria (Mia) Millefoglie

ABOUT THIS BOOK

A powerful family memoir about inheritance, identity, and the pull of the sea

Surrendered as an infant in America, Maria “Mia” was taken in by Sicilian immigrants in Gloucester, Massachusetts—a gritty working-class town steeped in salt and tradition. She inherits a name that traces back to 19th-century Sicily, where her great-grandfather was abandoned as a newborn on la ruota dei proietti, the “wheel of the castoffs.” Christened Millefoglie, “a thousand leaves, a thousand pages,” he crossed the bold Atlantic to America’s shores, carrying with him a legacy of endurance and exile.

For generations, the Millefoglie men went to sea: dorymen who rose before dawn to cast their nets along jagged coastlines, captains of eastern-rig draggers navigating storms that could split a vessel in half, stowaways chasing the promise of a life they could scarcely imagine. They lived by tides, currents, and the unspoken rules of the ocean; their courage and skill tested daily by wind and water. The women, left on shore, learned a different kind of survival, keeping households, raising children, and enduring the constant absence of fathers, brothers, and husbands.

Into this world of fishermen and keepers of the shore, Mia was adopted, learning early that bloodlines dictate identity and tradition shapes fate. College is forbidden; marriages are arranged, and no one abandons the family. By nineteen, trapped in a fish-packing job and lost in a haze of drugs, Mia does the unthinkable: she leaves. Decades later, drawn back to Gloucester’s weathered harbor to care for her aging parents, Mia begins to unearth her family’s buried stories, tracing the lineage from a Sicilian orphanage to a New England fishing port and the invisible inheritance that shaped them all.

Both intimate and historical, Daughters of Stone and Tide is a meditation on identity, abandonment, and belonging—a fisherman’s daughter’s search to understand the forces that bind and break a family across generations and seas.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

MARIA “MIA” MILLEFOGLIE is a creative writer who has focused on immigration and assimilation, religious and cultural traditions, women’s roles in the workplace, healthcare, and the New England fishing industry. Her work has appeared in The Stonecoast Review and Entropy, and she is a contributing author of Our People, Our Stories: The Gloucester 400+ Commemorative Book.

REVIEWS

“A wonderfully compelling and achingly moving memoir, a fraught tribute to its gifted author’s deep roots not only as a Sicilian-American, but as the girl raised by a family who for generations toiled for fish on the often-perilous sea.Daughters of Stone and Tide is a timely and important memoir, and I will never forget it.”—Andre Dubus III, author ofTownie and House of Sand and Fog

“This is such a gorgeously written story about the grace and power of family legacy. Maria Millefoglie has created an incredibly moving exploration of where she belongs and the power of story to heal and reveal. The book’s language is so rich and layered it feels like it’s been painted in the most beautiful ambers and ochres of her beloved Sicily. In trying to answer the very deepest questions of where she comes from, Millefoglie shows us most of all how she learned to love.”—Susan Conley, author of Landslide: A Novel and The Foremost Good Fortune: A Memoir

“Domestic epic meets elegy in this vivid, enthralling memoir.”—Edvige Giunta, author of Writing With An Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors

“Millefoglie weaves together a complex and captivating multigenerational immigrant story. Sifting through the stories of three generations of ancestors who immigrated from Sicily to Gloucester, Daughters of Stone and Tide chronicles a young woman’s quest to find belonging and identity, family and home.”—Marguerite S. Shaffer, author of See America First: Tourism and National Identity 1880-1940

“Befitting one definition of the Millefoglie surname, this book holds a thousand pages of wonder. Without a shred of sentimentalism, the author interprets every story, point of view, act and emotion so keenly; as she looks into the mirror, I looked into my own.”—Suzanne Strempek Shea, author of This is Paradise: An Irish Mother’s Greif, an African village’s plight, and the medical clinic that brought fresh hope to both

“A beautifully written and deeply captivating narrative. Anyone who has had to navigate complicated family relationships, who has struggled to belong, who has sought to transform their own stories, or who has wanted to find their voice amidst difficult silences will find companionship in the pages of Millefoglie’s book.”—Melanie Brooks, author of A Hard Silence: One daughter remaps family, grief, and faith when HIV/AIDS changes it all

“Mia Millefoglie, the daughter of a fisherman, captures the soul of Sicilian culture in this poignant memoir. With a poetic voice that draws you in, she carries you through a love story about family that spans generations and continents.”—Laura M. Alberghini Ventimiglia, author of Women of Light: Betta’s Story

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Illustrations

Preface

Prologue

Harbor's Wake

Part I. Origins and Ancestors

The Name That Tethers Us

Contents to the Wind

The Old Fort

The Casting of Nets

Favazza—A Single Ancestor

Marriage Arrangements

Abandonments

Valentina

War and Proclamations

Promises and Prophecies

Part II. In the Shadows of Churches

Pickup Days

Entering the Shadows of Churches

A Fisherman's Table

Under the Arch

Leaving the Shadows of Churches

Part III. Lost in the Tides

Going Public

The Jaws of the Drawbridge

Fish-Packing Tales

Stones and Bridges

Pulled Like the Tide

Graduation

Black Communion Dress

Part IV. Crossing the Bridge

The Cut

Harvard for the Working Class

Limbo

A Bouquet of Oregano

Erasure

Turning Points

Part V. Storms and Sinkings

Down to the Sea

My Mother's Bed

A Chain of Flowers

Transitions

Santa Lucia

A Gloucester Wedding Day

Slack Tide

Part VI. Thresholds

Crossing into the New

Homeward

Uncovering the Stones

The Distance Between Strangers

Shadow Boxes

Last Rites

The Ocean Was Ours

An Unfinished Tapestry

Acknowledgments