Ebook: L Is for Lion: An Italian Bronx Butch Freedom Memoir

FINALIST – 2014 Lambda Literary Award in the Lesbian Memoir/Biography Category, presented by the Lambda Literary Foundation

A 1960s Bronx tomboy learns how to survive her brutal but humorous Italian family and all the rest that life throws her. The harder you hit the pavement, the higher you fly.

This vivid memoir speaks the intense truth of a Bronx tomboy whose 1960s girlhood was marked by her father’s lullabies laced with his dissociative memories of combat in World War II. At four years old, Annie Rachele Lanzillotto bounced her Spaldeen on the stoop and watched the boys play stickball in the street; inside, she hid silver teaspoons behind the heat pipes to tap calls for help while her father beat her mother. At eighteen, on the edge of ambitious freedom, her studies at Brown University were halted by the growth of a massive tumor inside her chest. Thus began a wild, truth-seeking journey for survival, fueled by the lessons of lasagna vows, and Spaldeen ascensions. From the stoops of the Bronx to cross-dressing on the streets of Egypt, from the cancer ward at Memorial Sloan-Kettering to New York City’s gay club scene of the ’80s, this poignant and authentic story takes us from underneath the dining room table to the stoop, the sidewalk, the street, and, ultimately, out into the wide world of immigration, gay subculture, cancer treatment, mental illness, gender dynamics, drug addiction, domestic violence, and a vast array of Italian American characters. With a quintessential New Yorker as narrator and guide, this journey crescendos in a reluctant return home to the timeless wisdom of a peasant, immigrant grandmother, Rosa Marsico Petruzzelli, who shows us the sweetest essence of soul.

“…a truly inspirational story that takes us beyond gender, beyond sexual persuasion, and into the humanity that defines us all … Annie’s is a liberating story, not only in what happens to her, but in the way she tells it … L Is for Lion is an extraordinary telling of ordinary experiences in the life of a Bronx Butch.” — Fra Noi

“You need to read this book because it’s the most powerful depiction I have ever read of how a human being can draw on her folk culture, her humor, and her poetic insight to pull life-affirming meaning out of the gutter like a lost spaldeen … L Is for Lion is a luscious lasagna pulled from the hot stove that binds us together as human beings.” — Steve Zeitlin, City Lore

“Annie Rachele Lanzillotto is a vividly talented writer whose coming of age story as a Bronx Italian lesbian creates a superb memoir. Rollicking with detail, poetic in language L Is for Lion is the book you read while walking through the house or out to your mailbox, just not wanting to pause even a moment.” — San Francisco Book Review

“This sprawling narrative could be called an Italian memoir, a Bronx memoir, a cancer memoir, a veteran father memoir, a 1960s childhood memoir, a mother-daughter memoir, or a lesbian memoir. In an ambitious display of storytelling, Lanzillotto’s charming collection of vignettes encompasses all of these identities at once … L Is for Lion comes across like a bright, entertaining friend who tells the best stories—the kind you never forget.” — Lambda Literary