Alive with telling detail, incandescent prose, and fresh insights into her adopted nation and city, Clementi’s sweeping memoir follows her from a childhood in Rome that found her dreaming of New York City, to graduate school in the “bubbly ferment” of Brandeis, near a Boston that is stubbornly not Manhattan; and then to exciting, unexpected opportunities in New York. Her circuitous route at times proves harrowing. She endures relentless sexual harassment as a young writer and thinker in Rome—"America may be militaristic, imperialistic, and hypernationalistic,” she notes, “but it recognizes the right of ‘No’ for women”—and later endures assault and rape during a brief New Jersey marriage.

But Clementi refuses to yield her story to horrible men. Despite moments of tension and heartbreak, South of My Dreams is a richly pleasurable read, its heft and discursiveness lightened by a restless intelligence and a passion for living. Her first days in New York find her falling in love with an Upper West Side diner and then hoofing it all the way down Broadway to the Battery. “What a pity that immigrants’ first impression today is but a frigid airport,” she writes. That energy persists when, in the late 1990s, she finds work as a reporter for the Queens Tribune (“$16,000 a year, no expense reimbursements”) before moving on to Town & Village (for whom she once interviewed a thoroughbred pug), and elsewhere. Apartment hunting, how sex and dating differ from sitcoms, the city’s deep Jewishness, and the surprising way Bill Clinton is responsible for her green card, are all explored with wit and vigor.

A late destination, teased by the title, surprises: Clementi becomes “the eccentric Italian professor of Jewish literature” in South Carolina. That adjustment compels, but Clementi is especially strong on the topic of cities and self-authorship, noting that her New York is a bit of a fantasy but that “I invent it a little too, hoping that my version will make room for me.” NYC lovers will find much to feast on.

Takeaway: Exuberant, incisive memoir of dreaming of and inventing a New York life.

Comparable Titles: Tova Mirvis’s The Book of Separation, David Adjami’s Lot Six.

Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A