Paperback Edition
ISBN:9781558612709
Publication Date: 04-01-2001

Beneath its seemingly scandalous surface, Flavia Alaya's life story goes to the heart of women's struggles for independence, self-definition, and sexual agency.

A radiant but sheltered Italian-American woman on a Fulbright in Italy, Flavia was twenty-two years old when she met Father Harry Browne. When the attraction that began in a cafe in Perugia grew too compelling to resist, they embarked on a relationship that violated one of the most powerful taboos of the Church and of society, yet endured for over two decades. By day, they were subsumed in progressive community organizing. By night, they were subsumed in a relationship carried out, even through the birth of their three children, in absolute secrecy—sub rosa, or "under the rose."

"Flavia Alaya has written a memoir with a rare elegiac style. She works the supreme magic of combining a deeply personal story whilst narrating a fascinating history of a moribund Church. Deeply spiritual with love and tragedy, but finally, a woman triumphant." —Malachy McCourt, author of A Monk Swimming: A Memoir

"Here is a timeless passion, recalled with a historian's precision. But it is also a modern political document. Because these lovers took the definitions with which their times tried to imprison them—definitions of woman, of priest, of powerlessness—and transformed them, first in their own lives, and then out in the world." —Nuala O'Faolain, author of Are You Somebody?: The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman

"Flavia Alaya's richly textured story kept me up half the night, riveted by its dauntless passion and fierce insight. For those of us who are Italian Americans and sometime Catholics, Alaya's tale will have special power in its unraveling of mysteries and sanctities that shaped our lives. But her headlong rush toward remembrance of things past will have extraordinary resonance, too, for all who have lived, loved, lost—and won." —Sandra M. Gilbert, author of Ghost Volcano

"Flavia Alaya writes beautifully. She brings moments of intense feeling vividly to life. And without belaboring it, she moves beyond a patriarchal morality that cast her as a mala femina into a humane and loving view of life." —Marilyn French, author of The Women's Room