Love & Gelato

The novel opens with Lina struggling in the early, raw stages of her grief. At just 16 years old, Lina confronts one of the most devastating traumas a child can experience: the death of a parent—in Lina’s case, her only parent.

Six months after her mother’s death from pancreatic cancer, a particularly virulent strain that offered few treatment options, Lina finds herself in Florence, unable to sleep, and crying quietly to herself, observing, “Now that it had been more than six months, I could sometimes go whole hours pretending to be okay […] Turns out reality is hard and unforgiving […] and I had to live the whole rest of my life without her” (30).

Lina’s loss is so fresh that she’s still grappling with the reality that her mother’s truly gone. Staying with Howard Mercer, the caretaker of the national war cemetery, Lina is confronted by death every time she looks out her bedroom window at the rows of white crosses bleached by the moonlight. This gothic setting points to Lina’s state of mind. She feels empty, haunted, and prone to outbursts of tears without explanation. She’s initially indifferent to food and clings to her friend Addie. Her method of coping is long-distance running, off by herself, pushing her body mile after grueling mile until she obliterates the part of her that cannot stop thinking about her mother’s death. She resists Howard’s attentive care for her—she knows how it feels to lose such nurturing love and how quickly and cruelly it can be taken away. Through Lina, Welch paints a narrative portrait of a character struggling to recover from a devastating loss.

Reading the journal offers Lina her first foothold in recovery. Reading about her mother’s experience in Florence and realizing how closely her own experience parallels her mother’s gives her a reassuring feeling of her mother’s presence that helps her begin to heal. It also provides her with a sense of purpose. She asks, “Was this part of the reason [her] mom sent her journal? So [they] could experience Florence together?” (100).

The journal—and the mission to find her biological father that it catalyzes—helps Lina to ease slowly forward, allowing her to reclaim a full range of emotions again. As she and Ren search for Matteo, she experiences attraction, joy, pleasure, anger, resentment, and embarrassment alongside her grief. Reading her mother’s entries, hearing her mother’s voice, makes Lina feel that she herself is coming back to life. After meeting Ren and the other students from the international school, she “[feels] the most alive [she has] in more than a year. Maybe ever” (130). The journal allows her to both acknowledge the emotional complexity of her mother as a human and to see that, even in death, her mother will be a very real presence in her life. Ultimately, Lina realizes her mother’s death does not preclude Lina from being happy: “I don’t ever get to stop missing her,” she decides, “but that [doesn’t] mean [I won’t] be okay. Or even happy” (330-31). In emerging from her grief, Lina has turned absence into presence. By ending the novel with Lina anticipating tomorrow, rather than dreading it or feeling numb to it as she did in the beginning, Welch addresses the ongoing reality of grief and loss from a perspective of hope. It is not so much a happy ending, but rather a joyous beginning.

The emotional core of both Hadley’s and Lina’s narratives is a choice between passion and love. Hadley’s journal makes it clear to both her daughter and Howard that she believes she made the wrong decision in choosing passion over love, establishing the novel’s thematic preference for the latter over the former. In Ren Ferrara and Thomas Heath, Lina faces the same choice her mother faced between Howard Mercer and Matteo Rossi—a choice between passion, which is exciting, intense, and incendiary but fleeting and shallow, and love, which is quiet, gentle, steady, enduring, and deep. Hadley’s and Lina’s experiences with two polar-opposite kinds of men initially excite them, then confuse them, and then compel each to make a choice.

For Hadley, although Matteo Rossi initially represents passion, he’s revealed to be mercurial and emotionally volatile and an unapologetic womanizer with a volcanic temper who abuses his power as a professor to form inappropriate relationships with his students. For Hadley, the months when she conducts her clandestine affair with X are months filled with intrigue and the adrenaline rush of risk, which quickly fades when her pregnancy brings out the selfishness and cruelty she initially mistook for passion. In comparison, Howard is, by his own admission, a Southern gentleman—grounded, respectful, and decent. His nearly 20-year love for Hadley and willingness to embrace Lina as his own daughter exemplifies his kindness, his compassion, his sensitivity, and above all his selflessness—all qualities the novel positions as tenets of enduring love.

Like her mother, Lina faces a choice between two men; but unlike her mother, Lina has her mother’s past experiences and the benefit of Hadley’s hindsight to guide her. For Lina, who’s only 16 years old, it’s less of a choice about enduring romantic love for the rest of her life and more of a critical step in The Journey to Self-Discovery—defining who she wants to be and what she values. Thomas is the kind of handsome that makes Lina feel she “could totally imagine him lounging around on Mt. Olympus” (125), but the shallowness of his attraction, his crude behavior during the fireworks display, and his curt dismissal of Lina after she rejects his advances reveal that he sees Lina primarily as a sexual conquest. By contrast, Welch uses Ren’s actions to reveal his integrity and caring heart. He insists on breaking up with Mimi before acting on his feelings for Lina. He listens to Lina with empathy for her sense of displacement and loneliness in Florence. He respects Lina and himself too much to pursue a relationship with her if she thinks of him only as a friend. He offers Lina what Howard offered to Hadley and what Hadley (unlike Lina) rejected: the promise of a stable relationship grounded in respect, communication, and emotional support.