At 17 years old, Josie is very concerned with what her peers think of her. She dreams of being popular at school and eventually, of being wealthy and influential in adulthood—but for a variety of reasons, Josie fears she’s never going to achieve these dreams. Both Mama and Josie’s grandmother, Nonna, meanwhile, are very tuned in to their Italian community’s gossip mill—and, in Josie’s opinion, are far too afraid of what people might say about them, even though she shares the same fears. Through Josie, Mama, and Nonna’s experiences with gossip and their perceived need to keep up appearances, Looking for Alibrandi shows that communities use gossip as a means of control—namely, to keep members from behaving in ways the community deems inappropriate. The novel ultimately suggests that gossip (or even just the threat of gossip) can have outsize power to influence people’s lives and choices, often in unhealthy or dangerous ways.
At first, Josie characterizes gossip as a fact of life that’s unpleasant and annoying, but unavoidable. Josie describes experiencing gossip at school and at home, in her close-knit Italian community. At school, Josie believes her classmates gossip about her because she’s Italian, illegitimate, and attends St. Martha’s on a scholarship. Gossip, then, keeps Josie from ever forgetting what she perceives as her lower-class position—students of a higher class, or who are more popular, don’t suffer the same kind of gossip as far as Josie knows. And at home, gossip is merely annoying. Josie jokes sarcastically about the Italian gossip mill keeping the phone companies in business—the Italian gossips are the ones who alert Mama and Nonna, for instance, to the fact that Josie was seen with her friends riding in a boy’s car wearing skimpy clothes. So in Josie’s opinion, gossip is unfortunate and unavoidable—but it’s merely annoying.
The novel also offers clues that show gossip is a way to control others’ perceptions and behaviors. Josie knows full well that she needs to behave in a very specific way in order to not give the Italian gossips in particular anything to talk about. She tells Jacob at one point that she’d like to be a “rebel Italian” and go against all the cultural rules and expectations guiding, for instance, when and with whom Josie has sex or marries. But because Josie knows she’s under increased scrutiny by the Italian community due to her being illegitimate, she insists that being a “rebel Italian” is out of the question. So in this way, Josie clearly modifies or polices her own behavior so that she doesn’t inspire gossip. But in the same vein, Josie also knows how to manipulate gossip to help herself. She does this most notably when she calls her father, Michael Andretti, to help her at school after she breaks a popular girl’s nose with her science textbook. As Josie walks down the hallway with Michael after leaving Sister Louise’s office, she loudly engages Michael in a conversation about his job as a barrister, knowing full well that people are going to be incredulous that she has a father—and that she has a father who also happens to be a barrister. In this way, Josie uses gossip to help her own position at school.
However, Looking for Alibrandi also makes it clear that gossip’s ability to control people can be extremely sinister and damaging. This becomes especially apparent as Nonna gradually tells Josie about her affair with an Australian man named Marcus Sandford many years ago. As a young, beautiful Italian woman married to a cruel older man, Nonna fell in love and had sex with Marcus out of loneliness. Though Nonna’s choice to enter the relationship in the first place might read as a rejection of the gossip mill’s power, her choices once she discovered she was pregnant show just how much Nonna feared gossip. Nonna feared that leaving Nonno for Marcus would have subjected Mama to a life of gossip and ridicule. She explains that at that time, a child born to one Italian parent and one Australian parent would’ve been widely scorned. Nonna believed the only way to give Mama a chance at a normal life was to stay with Nonno and raise Mama as Nonno’s daughter, keeping Mama’s true paternity a secret from everyone—Mama included. And this is only the first of many instances in which Josie’s family members make painful and even harmful choices out of fear of attracting gossip. Nonno was so afraid of what people might say if they found out that it took another man to give Nonna a child that he agreed to raise Mama as his own, something that was no doubt painful for him. But he treated Mama terribly throughout her childhood, and even kicked her out when she became pregnant with Josie. Though Josie realizes that part of Nonno’s reasoning had to do with the fact that he resented Mama for not being his biological child, the generally accepted story is that he wasn’t going to stand by his daughter while the gossips said horrible things about his family.
While Looking for Alibrandi doesn’t come to any clear conclusions on how people should handle gossip, it’s nevertheless significant that Josie attributes her eventual “emancipation” (which she defines as coming of age) to the fact that she gradually starts to care less about what the gossips think of her. There’s freedom to be had, this suggests, by not putting so much stock in what other people say or think—but that doesn’t mean that what other people say isn’t still dangerous or worth paying attention to. And the novel does offer hope that as social mores change over the decades, things once considered worthy of gossip, scorn, and estrangement—like having a baby out of wedlock—will become more accepted and, as this happens, gossip will naturally become less powerful.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Gossip and Appearances ThemeTracker
Gossip and Appearances 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.
Even though the girls at St. Martha’s don’t mention it, I bet you they’re talking about me behind my back. I can feel it in my bones. It makes me feel I will never be a part of their society and I hate that because I’m just as smart as they are.
We weren’t on the news that night. Poison Ivy was, because she was in the group that threw questions at the Premier. As usual she was there in Technicolor, sitting on top of the world. No matter how much I hate Poison Ivy, I want to belong to her world. The world of sleek haircuts and upper-class privileges. People who know famous people and lead educated lives. A world where I can be accepted.
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.”
The first time I saw a nun without a habit, I prayed for her, thinking that she’d go to hell. But I think Sister Louise made me change my mind. I’ve never met a more liberated woman in my life and I realize now that these women do not live in cloistered worlds far away from reality. They know reality better than we do. I just wonder whether she was ever boy-crazy.
“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 just ignored her. I’m getting good that way. Things that worried me a few months ago no longer worry me as much. I can’t say that I’m completely oblivious. The gossiping of the Italian community might not matter to some, but I belong to that community.
Sometimes I feel that no matter how smart or how beautiful I could be they would still remember me for the wrong things.
That’s why I want to be rich and influential. I want to flaunt my status in front of those people and say, “See, look who I can become.”
“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.”
Tomato Day.
Oh God, if anyone ever found out about it I’d die. There we sat last Saturday in my grandmother’s backyard cutting the bd bits off overripe tomatoes and squeezing them.
[…]
I can’t understand why we can’t go to Franklin’s and buy Leggo’s or Paul Newman’s special sauce. Nonna had heart failure at this suggestion and looked at Mama.
“Where is the culture?” she asked in dismay. “She’s going to grow up, marry an Australian and her children will eat fish-and-chips.”
Robert and I call this annual event “Wog Day” or “National Wog Day.” We sat around wondering how many other poor unfortunates our age were doing the same, but we were sure we’d never find out because nobody would admit to it.
“[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 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?
But I think I cried more out of relief than self-pity. Relief because I was beginning to feel free.
From whom?
Myself, I think.
“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.”
“How dare he kill himself when he’s never had any worries! He’s not a wog. People don’t get offended when they see him and his friends. He had wealth and breeding. No one ever spoke about his family. Nobody ever needed to because everyone knew that his father was the man they wanted down in Canberra. Nobody ever told their kids they weren’t allowed to play over at his place. Yet he killed himself. How could somebody with so much going for him do that?”
Ivy was valedictorian, but then I never doubted that. Simply because I guess she deserved it more than me.
I met her at one stage in the ladies’ and I realized that she wasn’t Poison Ivy anymore. She was just Ivy. As scared as I was of what it meant to be out of our uniform. She smiled hesitantly and I smiled back, and I saw tears in her eyes.
