Walking Through Mirrors
From Calabria to "America": Growing Up Canadian in an Immigrant home
by John Dominelli

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In Walking Through Mirrors, his second memoir, John Dominelli returns to the rooms, streets, train tracks, and creek beds of his childhood, tracing his life from a fraught birth in an immigrant household to the threshold of the three-year spiritual journey that he chronicled in his initial book, Words Between Worlds. The first Canadian-born son in a large Italian family, John watches as his parents’ old world instincts collide with the new world of suburban Vancouver and learns to straddle both realities. Employing humor, insight, and a decidedly literary eye, John remembers it all—the dream that sent his father across the ocean; the fateful deception his mother crafted, so the family would follow; the raucous dinner table where myths, music, and Catholic terror mixed with laughter; the Port Coquitlam yards and creeks where an immigrant kid learned to be Canadian; and the odd, shimmering moments when a child first realizes he has a self and that time, death, faith, language, and desire are all mysteries to be explored. With a musician’s ear and a comic’s timing, he turns family legends and his own formative experiences into a bigger meditation on memory, belonging, and the meaning that threads itself through ordinary lives.

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John Dominelli was born in British Columbia soon after his parents emigrated from Italy, and he grew up moving constantly between the old world preserved inside his family’s home and the new world waiting outside it. That double vision—inherited identity and chosen one—eventually sent him traveling in search of the difference between his “cultural” self and his “essential” self. Despite having experienced so much of what the wider world has to offer, John returned to the place that first held both of those selves at once, his beloved British Columbia.

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John Dominelli

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