A restrained, penetrating memoir of childhood and inherited identity.
Vado’s memoir offers a measured, unsentimental examination of how a child learns to survive within the overlapping pressures of family, culture, and unspoken rules. The book’s frame is deceptively simple. Now in his sixties, Vado finds himself rolling his childhood die-cast cars across a table, allowing memory to surface without force. “This car was no mere toy,” he writes. “It was all the possible futures I might have.” That line establishes the book’s emotional center. The cars are not sentimental props; they are containers for longing, control, embarrassment, aspiration, and imagination. Each chapter is anchored to a single vehicle, but the narrative weight rests on the child who used play as a way to understand a world governed by rules he did not create.
Vado’s mother looms large throughout the book, volatile, loving, unpredictable, and absolute. Her authority governs the household with no room for negotiation. When she enters a room, tension follows. “Company comn’. Pick dis up and put it away!” she orders, and the command carries consequence as much as instruction. His father, quieter and emotionally distant, offers occasional protection but little refuge. From an early age, the child learns to read the emotional weather of rooms, to retreat when necessary, to comply when resistance would cost too much.
Growing up Italian American in late-1960s San Jose places Vado in a constant in-between. English is not his first language, and fluency arrives piecemeal. “It was like learning to play the piano from someone who doesn’t have fingers,” he observes, capturing the disorientation of assimilation without turning it into grievance. Misunderstandings follow him into school and friendships. Names become vulnerabilities. Jokes misfire. A toy’s name becomes an invitation for ridicule. These moments are minor in isolation, but cumulative in effect. Play becomes both refuge and rehearsal. The Sunday living-room races on bright-orange track are rituals governed by rules Vado controls. Cars are disqualified. Wrecks must “convalesce.” Order is imposed where life offers none. “Without tradition and ritual,” he asks, “are we not just savages?”
The book’s quiet power lies in restraint. Vado does not exaggerate or retrofit adult judgment onto childhood scenes. Losses are absorbed rather than explained. Humor surfaces often, but it is sharpened by exposure rather than softened by nostalgia. By its end, the book reveals itself not as nostalgia, but as an inquiry into memory itself. The cars are sold. The stories remain. What survives is not the object, but the imprint of a childhood spent learning how to endure, imagine, and move forward anyway. Readers who loved the quiet reckoning of Educated by Tara Westover, or the unsentimental childhood portrait of The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, will find a similarly intimate, observant memoir here.
SLG Publishing
Pub date December 12, 2025
ISBN 978-1593623319
Print length 98 pages
Price $25.00 (USD) Hardcover, $12.95 Paperback, $8.95 KIndle edition, $0.00 Kindle unlimited
