Surviving the <i>Father</i> land in Josephine Gattuso Hendin's <i>The Right Thing to Do</i> (1988) and Carl Capotorto's <i>Twisted Head</i> (2008)

Abstract Josephine Gattuso Hendin's award-winning 1988 novel The Right Thing to Do sprang from her intention to offer a realistic representation of the tumultuous relationship between an American-born daughter and her old school Italian father in the context of 1970s Astoria. Carl Capotorto's lesser-known 2008 memoir Twisted Head, recounts the memoirist's growing up in the Bronx of the 1960s and 1970s as he navigates his Italian American home, the changing American landscape, and his need to enjoy love and life as a gay artist. At the intersection of gender and ethnic studies, this article compares and contrasts Hendin's novel and Capotorto's memoir with regard their projections of traditional fathering, its anchoring in ethnic culture, and its clashes with later generations of Italian Americans; it claims that both narratives, regardless of their diverse genre, once read together, offer important insights into the forging of Italian American ethnic and sexual identity at the dawn of the twenty-first century.