Archive - February 19, 2022

  In Girls of Tender Age, Mary-Ann Tirone Smith (Cameroon 1965-67) fully articulates with great humor and tenderness the wild jubilance of an extended French-Italian family struggling to survive in a post-World War II housing project in Hartford, Connecticut. Hanging over this American childhood is the sinister shadow of an approaching serial killer. The menacing Bob Malm lurks throughout this joyous and chaotic family portrait, and the havoc he unleashes when the paths of innocence and evil cross one early December evening in 1953 forever alters the landscape of Smith’s childhood. Mary-Ann, who wrote the first published Peace Corps novel, Lament For A Silver-Eyed Woman in 1985, writes in this memoir of her childhood friend who was killed by a serial killer in her hometown, and how Mary-Ann helped to achieve justice for her childhood friend Pidgie D’Allessio who identified the killer who had also attached her. What follows is Mary-Ann’s account of . . .