Looking for Alibrandi follows a 17-year-old Australian girl named Josie as she prepares to take the exams for her High School Certificate (HSC) at the end of the school year. Josie lives with her Mama: a single mother who had Josie at age 17, much to the chagrin of Josie’s grandmother, Nonna. Josie detests having to see Nonna every day after school, as Nonna annoyingly always wants to talk about the past and what it was like being an Italian immigrant in Australia in the 1930s and 40s. To make things even worse for Josie, her long-lost father, Michael Andretti, moves back to Sydney at the beginning of the school year and learns that Josie is his daughter. At first, Josie sees family as something constricting, controlling, and burdensome. But particularly as Josie becomes closer to Nonna, learns some family secrets, and accepts Michael into her life, she gradually comes to see that family can be a source of love and sacrifice—and that one’s family can grow to accommodate new members.
At first, Josie believes that her family’s sole purpose is to make her feel inadequate and stifled. Josie has dealt with this feeling for much of her life—and even before she was born. When, as a teenager, Mama revealed she was pregnant out of wedlock, Josie’s very traditional and overbearing grandfather, Nonno, kicked Mama out of his home and refused to ever meet baby Josie. He died about a decade before the novel begins, and it was only at that point that Mama and Josie were accepted back into the fold. So Josie has grown up seeing firsthand that family isn’t always supportive or loving—indeed, she was deprived of even knowing much of her extended family until the time of Nonno’s death. In the present, Josie’s family makes her feel inadequate in a different way. During the afternoons she spends with Nonna after school, Josie feels like Nonna constantly picks on her for being “untidy” and “disrespectful.” Josie finds Nonna’s constant criticism grating, and it makes her feel like Nonna doesn’t truly love her or Mama (Nonna insists it’s Mama’s fault that Josie is so supposedly disrespectful). And because of this, Josie intends to get as far away from her family as possible when she grows up. In her mind, she can only become who she wants to be if she’s free of their stifling expectations of her.
Part of the reason that Josie feels so distanced from Nonna in particular is because she believes she and Nonna have nothing in common. Josie’s primary complaint about Nonna is that Nonna is old—Josie sees elderly people in general as out of touch and boring. She attributes much of Nonna’s obnoxious behavior, such as insisting on respect and tidiness, to Nonna’s age. But more than this, Josie also resents Nonna for going along with it when Nonno chose to kick Mama out years ago. Despite Josie’s qualms about her extended family, she’s extremely close to Mama and believes that her grandparents committed an unspeakable crime by kicking Mama out when she became pregnant as a teen. Josie insists at several points that she would’ve never kicked Mama out had she been in Nonna and Nonno’s position. This gives Josie an even stronger sense that she and Nonna are irreconcilably different.
However, as Josie begins to grow closer to Nonna, she discovers that she and Nonna aren’t actually so different—and that they can deepen their relationship as they learn how similar they actually are. As Josie listens to Nonna’s stories of being a boy-crazy teen and immigrating to Australia immediately after her marriage to Nonno at 17, Josie can’t help but wonder how alike she and Nonna actually are—17-year-old Josie, like 17-year-old Nonna, is very interested in boys. And especially when Josie discovers that Nonno isn’t actually Mama’s father (Nonna had an affair with an Australian man named Marcus Sandford that resulted in Mama) Josie suddenly has to confront the possibility that Nonna isn’t as boring as she thought. Nonna, just like Josie, was once young, made questionable choices, and didn’t follow her community’s rules. Even more meaningful for Josie, though, is the fact that learning the truth about Mama’s paternity sheds light on the family’s relationship with Nonno and the circumstances surrounding Josie’s birth. Josie learns that Nonno resented Mama because she wasn’t his biological daughter. Though he agreed to raise Mama as his own, he did so on the condition that Nonna didn’t “embarrass” him again, putting Nonna in a very difficult position. Nonna’s distant relationship with Mama, Josie comes to realize, is so distant because Nonna feared retaliation if she were to actually be close to her daughter. So when Mama became pregnant with Josie, Nonna didn’t feel like she could safely or successfully advocate for Mama and thus allowed Nonna to kick Mama out.
Learning these family secrets makes it incredibly clear to Josie see that what’s most important in a family is love and support, not formal ties like marriage. Learning about Nonno’s cruelty starts to diminish his importance in Josie’s mind, even though he’s technically her grandfather. But on the other hand, figures like Marcus and Michael—who are biological members of the family, but aren’t bound to the Alibrandis by marriage—start to take on more importance. As Michael and Josie’s relationship improves, Josie realizes it’s silly to resent Michael for leaving Mama when they were 17; rather, it’s healthier to focus on the fact that, in the present, Michael wants to be around for Josie and support her through her final year of high school. With this, the novel suggests that the way family members treat each other is far more meaningful than how exactly family members are related.
Related Themes from Other Texts
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Family Quotes in Looking for Alibrandi
I think things got worse when I started at St. Martha’s because I began to understand what the absence of a father meant. Also there were no Europeans like me. No Europeans who didn’t have money to back them up. The ones like me didn’t belong in the eastern and northern suburbs.
“Our circumstances are different, Josephine. I’ve never got on with her. When I was young she used to keep me at such a distance that I used to wonder what I could possibly have done wrong. My father was much worse and it was only after he died that she took a step toward me. By then I kept my distance. With you, it’s different. She’s always wanted to be close to you.”
Illegitimacy isn’t a big deal anymore. But it was back then and I remember the lies my grandmother would tell me. That I did have a father who died. My mother never lied to me that way. Maybe that’s what I dislike about Nonna. That she couldn’t accept things as they were. That she probably would have been spitting out some girl’s name and saying “They don’t even know who he is” if it weren’t her daughter.
Sometimes I feel really sorry for her. I think that my birth must have cut her like a knife and I feel as if she’s never forgiven Mama. But she loves us, even if it is in a suffocating way, and that makes me feel very guilty.
“It’s not the youth of today, Nonna,” I said angrily. “It’s you and people like you. Always worrying about what other people think. Always talking about other people. Well, we get spoken about as well, Nonna, and that’s your fault because you have no respect for other people’s privacy, including your daughter’s and granddaughter’s.”
I could picture [Ivy’s] parents at dinner with [John’s]. They’d talk about politics, the arts and world affairs. Then I tried to picture them at dinner with Nonna and Mama. Not that I have ever been ashamed of them, by any means. But what would they talk about? The best way of making lasagna? Our families had nothing in common.
“Well, I’d run and run and run so I couldn’t think.”
“And when you’d finished running you’d be thousands of miles away from people who love you and your problem would still be there except you’d have nobody to help you,” he said with a shrug.
“He’s attracted to me and for once someone found me interesting, not because I was Josie’s mother or Katia’s daughter but because I was me, and there is nothing, Josie, nothing you can do to take that away from me.”
She slammed my door and I wanted to cry. Because I didn’t want to take that feeling away from Mama. I just didn’t want him to give it to her.
I felt guilty in a way. Because I go on so much about my problems, but compared to John and all the other lonely people out there, I’m the luckiest person in the world.
“But what’s the big deal? Everyone has babies without being married these days. Everyone lives together and gets remarried,” he said, turning on his side.
I shook my head. “I can’t explain it to you. I can’t even explain it to myself. We live in the same country, but we’re different. What’s taboo for Italians isn’t taboo for Australians. People just talk, and if it doesn’t hurt you, it hurts your mother or your grandmother or someone you care about.”
Like all tomato days we had spaghetti that night. Made by our own hands. A tradition that we’ll never let go. A tradition that I probably will never let go of either, simply because like religion, culture is nailed into you so deep you can’t escape it. No matter how far you run.
“[Zio Ricardo] couldn’t take me in when I was pregnant with you. My father wouldn’t have let my mother see her sister again if he did. But he let Robert’s mother take me in, saying that he couldn’t govern who his daughter let into her house.” She looked pensive. “My father practically spat at me. Called me every name under the sun. A tramp, a slut. He hit me across the face and even hit my mother. Worse still, he never saw you, Josie. Never saw his own granddaughter. Tell me, what comes first? What other people think of your family, or love?”
I think my family has come a long way. The sad thing is that so many haven’t. So many have stayed in their own little world. Some because they don’t want to leave it, others because the world around them won’t let them in.
All this information I’ve gathered from Nonna and Mama, who was a child of the sixties, I’m going to try to remember it.
So one day I can tell my children. And so that one day my granddaughter can try to understand me, like I’m trying to understand Nonna.
I wonder about life if Nonna had married Marcus Sandford. If Mama had been Christina Sandford, daughter of Marcus Sandford, and not Christina Alibrandi, daughter of an Italian immigrant. Would life have been different for her? Would she have depended on Michael so much and would she have slept with him like she did, which was more out of loneliness caused by her parents than pressured sex?
“Oh, Jozzie, you still do not understand,” she sighed. “Could you imagine how life would be for me if I married Marcus? Could you imagine what life would be for my sister? People are cruel. They would make our lives hell. But mostly, Jozzie, tink of Christina. Back then, tink of the way my darling Christina would be treated. It is not like these times, Jozzie. She would have no one. No Australians, no Italians. People would spit at her and say she was nuting.”
I’ve figured out that it doesn’t matter whether I’m Josephine Andretti who was never an Alibrandi, who should have been a Sandford and who may never be a Coote. It matters who I feel like I am—and I feel like Michael and Christina’s daughter and Katia’s granddaughter; Sera, Anna, and Lee’s friend, and Robert’s cousin.
