Last summer, I took a trip to Italy to finish my upcoming book The Sicilian Inheritance—a delicious twisty-turny family murder mystery. Wandering around Palermo one afternoon, I walked into a tiny boutique and spied a pair of showstopping hot-pink pants. I hadn’t worn anything that brash, loud, and bright since college (and even then, in moderation). They called to me, and I just had to try them on. My heart sank when I saw that they were tight around my stomach—I’d had my third baby just the year before. I sheepishly told the saleswoman I wouldn’t be taking them.
“Shut your mouth!” she told me (through a cigarette). “You are beautiful. You are worried about this?” She pinched my belly so hard, it left a mark. “Who cares? No one cares. You will wear these pants like a queen.”
Reader, I bought the pants. Of course, I bought the pants. I bought them because I was a little afraid of her and also because maybe she was right. It was among my many brushes with what I’ll call Big Sicilian Energy, something I hope becomes an import for American women.
Let me back up a little: This year, I turned an age when society has long told women to start disappearing. The age is 43—it’s about smack in the middle of life and a time when women begin to be politely ignored, instead of celebrated in the ways we were in our 20s and 30s. At this age, most of us are no longer making babies, getting married, and starring as the main character in our quirky romantic comedies...or so we have been told.
But what we have been told is wrong. These days, I’m getting brasher and louder and bolder. It has a lot to do with this trip and what I learned from the Sicilian women I met. Along with all the wine and the smuggled cheese and meats, I ended up bringing something unexpected back across the Atlantic Ocean with me. I brought back glorious Big Sicilian Energy.
Sicilian women often feel like a different breed of woman from their American counterparts. I would go so far as to say it is like comparing a house cat to a leopard. They don’t give a shit what you think about them. They carry themselves with pride and confidence. They wear bikinis at all ages in all sizes while wearing a scowl that says (through their cigarettes, of course), “Yeah...I’m still fucking hot.” I loved it and I loved them. I wanted to be them and I wanted to make out with them all at once.
I saw Sicilian women’s fierceness constantly during my visit. I saw it in bars where they sidled up to me to start conversations about everything and nothing. I saw it in restaurants where strangers leaned over and asked to try something off my plate. I saw it on beaches where women in their 90s were getting tanned in places on their bodies that on mine haven’t seen the sun in 10 years.
Everyone else seems freakishly slow compared to Sicilian women. Their hands helicopter around their heads as they talk. They buzz about bars and piazzas like hummingbirds in heat. They touch you all the time—kissing your cheeks (sometimes your lips, in a friendly way), adjusting your clothes, rubbing kind circles around your back for no reason. They constantly want to feed you. And yet none of it is exhausting. Their energy is contagious in the best of ways and permeates every page of my novel. It even inspired me to create a new character I hadn’t even planned on: a Sicilian businesswoman named Giusy (pronounced JUICY) who gets shit done while wearing a gold chain with links as big as half dollars and a pushup bra that lifts her boobs up to her chin.
As a supposedly middle-aged woman, I’ve tried to infuse this confidence into every aspect of my life. I say what I want. I tell my friends they are queens and dance in the middle of restaurants that have no dance floor. I own who I am, despite what society might tell me about who I should be “at my age.”
I won’t lie and say sometimes it’s not a struggle. A few months after I got home to Philly, I had to do a new author photo shoot for Sicilian Inheritance and I was dreading it a little. Why couldn’t I just use the same one from almost a decade ago? As I was scouring my closet for outfits, I tried to find things that would connote a very serious author lady of a certain age. Then I found my hot-pink pants.
“You are a queen,” I whispered to myself as I pulled them out and then paired them with a matching hot-pink blazer and something even more daring…a top that was little more than a bra. Who the hell did I think I was? What was I doing?
I put on the pink suit. I showed off my belly and my cleavage and my body in a way that I haven’t in years. And I love those photos. I love every single one. I didn’t even want them touched up. Dare I say it, I glowed with that Big Sicilian Energy.
