A Very Good Year
Larry Cuocci
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2004 Palette Press
ISBN: 1932912045

Sometimes, something happens to you & in a moment your life has changed forever.

To Larry Cuocci (pronounced Coo-ah-chee) 1975, when he was seventeen, the world was both incredible & incomprehensible. He's a senior about to graduate, his mom is slowly, inexorably dying, his sister has been banished from home, his dad hates him, & yet every morning he wakes up hoping that today will be the day he finally gets laid & ends his “eternal purgatory as a virgin”.

So are the momentous memories of this son of a Catholic Italian baker & a Jewish American kindergarten teacher. He also remembers his preoccupation with “the three D's: drugs, death and driving.”

Born to an opera mad father who hardly knew his own father back in Italy, certainly knew little about raising children, & less about expressing affection, Larry learns to survive Sergio's mercurial & tyrannical temper. His father's world revolves around his wife, Grayce, & when she gets melanoma cancer, from years of unprotected sunbathing at the New Jersey seashore, he is demented by the agonies of chemo & radiation, watching his gloriously pretty wife disintegrate into a walking, vomiting husk.

To Grayce, Larry is her Little Savior often deflecting his father's rages away from her. Larry has deep & abiding memories of his mother during all the years of his schooling. She was musical & multi-lingual, & brought sunshine into her classroom & could charm her kids for hours. Often, as Larry moved up in grade, he would end his school days in his mother's classroom, & then walk her home.

On one such December afternoon, when he was only a boy, his mother is attacked by a purse-snatcher. From the wound she receives as she falls, grows the first gruesome cancer, & Larry carries the guilt that by not protecting her, he gave her the disease.

A Very Good Year is Larry Cuocci's memories of that wild & chaotic year when he cared for his mother & searches for the meaning of life. When his best friends, Wendy & Dylan, give him birthday presents & so much more. When his father berates him for being late to eat the birthday cake he's brought home, even as Grayce begs they not to fight. When snooty Keri entices him & he blooms into a poet. When he follows his loins & his heart on the hunt for love.

A Very Good Year is a very good memoir, passionately told in a mixture of fluid memories & disjointed unraveling of family history. Deeply intuitive, throat-clenching in the sorrow & pain of a wounded heart & a desperate soul, crying out for purpose & courage, even as his mother asks him for one final promise: that he not let her suffer longer than she can bear.

We've come a long way in family & grief counseling since Larry Cuocci was seventeen, & had to walk through the valley of his mother's death. While drama & tragedy thunder from every page like an Italian opera, & a young man's sexual yearnings & adventures tickle you into giggles, it is Larry Cuocci's lambent language that illumines his memories of administering to his tortured mom, & grasping life with both hands.

It was indeed A Very Good Year for Larry Cuocci & I commend him for a memoir that is heart-breaking, hilarious & healing.

Very well done!
(02/13/05)

Rebecca