It was a modest house, three stories of decaying Southern classicism. The very first memory I have of it is my mother painting its name, Girasole, over the front door. She was the daughter of Tuscan immigrants and spoke with the slightest touch of an accent, occasionally missing an ‘h’ here or there. My dad kindly painted a border of sunflowers around the mellifluous script so visitors could understand. A house that had a name—that was unusual in our sleepy neighborhood, but people seemed to accept it as "those crazy writers" being creative.

When the family had literary friends over, the game of the evening was always to figure out how the books were arranged. They covered the walls in dark shelves, stacked on anything flat or close to flat, lined up everywhere in an order no one knew but my parents. Apparently, not everyone grows up in a house made of books. I remember one man (science fiction novels my mother called "bold" and my dad called "pretentious") who insisted for years that they were arranged chronologically by publication date, despite the complete lack of evidence to support his claim. A few years later, a woman (erotica my mother called "formulaic" and my dad called "classic") hit upon the idea of reverse alphabetical order using key words in the titles, but my parents made a rare decision to preemptively discredit her theory. Nobody wanted to put forth the effort to test it, least of all Lia and me.

Guests used to bribe us to tell them how the books were arranged: empty sketchbooks and elegant paintbrushes for Lia, blank journals and fountain pens for me. I still remember gaggles of shocked faces when we would finally confess that we didn’t know the system either. It had been in place long before we were born and, like the wonders of the ancient world, would continue for millennia. Lia figured it out before she left, but never told me the trick. I believed that my parents had randomly arranged their books and then spent years laughing at their little joke, despite my dad’s quiet assurances that there was a definite and obvious pattern.

The first year we spent in Girasole, Dad surprised us all with a gift: giant sunflowers sprung out of the ground, nodding their heads at the windows. They made our house visible for miles, swarmed by bright yellow on top of a hill. My mother cried when we drove up to it once. She said it looked like home. A few times a week we would find her lying under the sunflowers and writing letters to her parents. To make her happy, Lia and I learned to speak and write passable Italian. We laid under the sunflowers with her and wrote letters to strangers named Nonna and Papo, and to a hundred cousins with elegant names like Marcello, Pia, Giuseppe, and Chiara. I used to steal a book from the lower shelves and hide under the blooms for hours, cooled by their shade. Lia drew there often. She had a whole series of sketches from behind the stalks, stealing glimpses of the outside world. They are quite good, very evocative; we talk idly of publishing them, but probably never will. Dad still has a green thumb, but he doesn’t grow sunflowers anymore. He planted tulips at my new house—we named it Cento Cuori, "a hundred hearts." I suggested Andiamo, "let’s go," but no one else got the joke.

Apparently, my parents were much more famous than Lia and I ever realized. One day while we were grocery shopping, a stranger stopped us and began reciting one of my dad’s poems. We stood in shock, unsure how to react, and as the man finished his performance with tears in his eyes, my dad stepped forward and shook hands with him. We never saw that man again, but I remember my mother chuckling as she whispered, "Your dad is better with fans, but I ‘ave more." My mother wrote everything from cinematic criticism to postmodernist prose—everything except poetry. She used to joke that she refused to write verse so as not to overshadow my dad. Dad would laugh along while he scribbled something that always seemed to end up in a best-selling collection. After I grew up, I read all of Dad’s poetry and most of the hundreds of publications of my mother. I was floored. They were amazing writers, and their works were fantastic. How had I come from that family? Lia drew like da Vinci and my parents wrote like angels. What did I do? I criticized, I graded, I lectured. They were so talented, but I started to notice an underlying sameness to many of their works. If my mother’s writing had any flaw, it was her innate disdain for American customs and culture. Dad’s poetry carried a strain of optimism that stopped him from exploring the darkest parts of life—but is that a weakness or a gift? Lia, well, she drew beautifully and elegantly, but not about much other than our family and our lives. That’s not her fault, but I have a hard time finding any other flaws in her art.

Once, we went to the city for a book signing and Lia disappeared. Dad and I ran in a frenzy around the bookstore, calling her name. When we finally found her, she was scribbling on the sidewalk with a nub of chalk. Dad and I stood silent, watching a boardwalk full of fairgoers and carnies emerge from blank pavement. I noticed a crying child lost in the mob with a toothless clown leering at him. We had just gotten home from a carnival that weekend—she was drawing what she remembered. We had seen that child, in those baggy jeans and that tattered windbreaker. The clown’s smile was a little more malicious in her picture but his face could have been a police sketch, it was so detailed and exact. After she finished, we walked back inside while Dad snapped a picture of the drawing. From that day on, Dad made sure to take photographs of most of her work, and we still have all the ones she didn’t sell or give away – portraits of the family, mostly. Because she was doing something creative, my mother dealt much better with her second daughter than her first daughter.

The day I told my mother I wanted to teach, she refused to acknowledge it. She pretended that it never happened. Dad did his best to soften the blow. He applauded my decision and even helped me pick a college. Mother never truly forgave me, even when I earned my doctorate in literature and became a professor at her alma mater. I spent my life avoiding her soft questions about the grand debut work I was supposed to be writing in my spare time. The day I got married, my mother quietly worried that a honeymoon would take away from my "valuable writing time". She gave us a check to pay for a five-week stay in a Tuscan villa, admonishing me not to spend all my time sightseeing. "It is marvelous writing country," she murmured. "Do not waste it." That was my mother—nothing if not focused. It was her dream that her daughters fall madly in love with writing like she and my dad. Once Lia died, I was her only hope.

By the time I came up with a plan to explain myself in a way she could understand, the doctors decided that my mother’s stomachaches were actually Crohn’s disease. I finished my last chapter the day after Dad told me she’d gone blind from a combination of eye inflammations and infections. I sent them the manuscript in November. It arrived on my mother’s birthday, but by then, she had stopped eating. I don’t know what she thought of it, since she slipped into a coma by New Year’s and died on Valentine’s Day.

Dad read it. A few months later, he sent me his review ("wistful" and "delicate"). I went back to my classes, went home to the babies, and went on with my life. We thought that was the end of it until one of his publisher friends sent me a letter begging me to sell. The cover art the company chose was perfect: an old snapshot of the front hall, books stacked on every flat surface, books lined against the walls, books dripping haphazardly into mounds on the floor. In the photo, one book – all violent blue and white roses – is framed in the back of the hall amongst shadowy dark volumes. The cover seemed to perfectly represent my parents, Lia, and me. In the end, everyone’s wishes were granted: I sold a book for my mother, who probably hated it (perhaps calling it "clumsy" or "naïve") if she even read it. Dad was finally able to move from literary artist to literary agent like he’d dreamed of for years. Lia is sketching in heaven, I think. As for me, I finally learned the secret.

At my release party, I leaned over and murmured, "Dad." He tilted toward me conspiratorially and whispered, "Yes, dear?" I murmured in his ear, "Tell me how the books were arranged." The cameras kept flashing as my father roared with laughter. On the way back to the hotel, he handed me his latest book and swore the answer was there. Weeks later, my eldest daughter found my copy, drenched in my dead ends and frustrations. "Mom," she said, "It’s obvious." When we went home to see my dad that Christmas, he chuckled with my daughters at dense old me, the one who took more than forty years to uncover what everyone else already knew. As I wandered around, small details and little memories began to creep back to me. By the sink, I traced the face of San Lorenzo – the patron saint of cooks and kitchens, a statuette my dad the lapsed Catholic bought in Florence. In my mother’s private writing room, I discovered a photograph I’d never seen before: three pretty girls laughing in the snow, all with long dark hair and pixie chins. We looked so happy there, my mother and Lia and me. I felt the air turn cold and I was six again, pulling off my mittens to touch the angel-wing snowflakes caught in my hair. Lia was there, too, tracing miniature snow angels with gloved hands and laughing as my mother danced around and around in the whiteness. She was saying something I couldn’t quite hear.

A vicious bark woke me up, and my dad’s monster of a mutt slobbered his way up to me, effectively ruining my good shoes. I snuck down the stairs and my family came into focus. My youngest, the spitting image of Lia, crouched with my middle daughter, a blonde nymph lured in from the lake. My eldest, with her grandmother’s face, recited verses from Rumi while my salt-and-peppered husband held our new son cuddled to his chest. Dad, wizened and wry, glanced over at me. My face and posture must have been something to see because he chuckled and turned back to listen as my daughter declaimed, "Open your hands / if you want to be held."