The Girl in the Italian Bakery, by Kenneth Tingle

The Girl in the Italian Bakery by Kenneth Tingle
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Memoirs are a funny thing: some tell about an idyllic life where the main person was born with the proverbial silver spoon and grew up to be a wonderful person who appreciated his or her life and status, while others tell of hardships that the person had to escape and crawl out of to become a productive and (preferably) happy member of society. The latter seems to make the better reading . Kenneth Tingle's The Girl In The Italian Bakery falls into this second category.

Tingle was the youngest of three brothers being raised by a single mother in poverty. While his mostly absent father does occasionally show up, he is seldom able to care for all three boys when they need him the most. Tingle's descriptions of living in the projects, of the disappearance of a young friend, of life in several foster homes are enough to make the reader wonder how he escaped his past. One brother has mental health issues and ends up institutionalized, while the middle brother blocks out much of what happens to the family, becoming part of the cycle of poverty/helplessness.

Throughout the first half of the book, the reader is left to wonder who the girl in the Italian bakery is and how she fits into Tingle's story. We finally see her as Tingle trudges home from a new high school one afternoon. While he never actually meets her, he falls in love with her - with the idea of her - and continues to walk home by the same route so that he can catch a glimpse of her. The one day he finally finds the courage to go in and speak with her, she disappears into the back of the bakery. Does he get to finally meet her?

The Girl In The Italian Bakery ends with Tingle and his wife living not the high-life, but rather a better life than he had grown up in. By the end, he has acknowledged that while he never officially met the girl - who he has seen several times since, but from a distance - he still has feelings for the memory of her, and how, in some way, he was helped want a better life because of her.

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