Archive: Around Town

Purchase Goodnight, My Angel "Goodnight My Angel" is a story about love and endurance, and great personal tragedy. Set in 1950s Cortland, it tells about Italian/American Susan Deligrossi, who falls in love with an Irish boy that she is not allowed to marry. So they go their separate ways and each marry other people.  Later she has a daughter who is born with a congenital heart defect.  Facing challenge after challenge Susan struggles to piece together her life.

If this sounds like the makings of a Romance novel, that is exactly what it is. Lansing author Diane Pellicciotti Kone based it on a key event in her life, when her own daughter, Paula Daniels, died at age 12 in 1994 of a congenital heart defect. Ms. Kone, at that time Diane Daniels, was a Lansing teacher who taught in the Elementary and Middle Schools for 33 years.

When her daughter died, Ms. Kone wrote as a way of consoling herself. "I cloistered myself in a fishing cottage on the St. Lawrence River and I wrote a book about the tragedies and the treasures of Paula's life. It took four summers. I ended up in a cottage on Little York Lake, which was closer. I needed to be near the water."

"When Paula was really sick she begged me to take her to Florida." With the doctor's encouragement she made the trip and Paula got to see the ocean. "I guess that's what drew me to the water," says Ms. Kone.

Her husband Dave Kone and surviving daughter Amy wanted her to publish the book, but she felt she would have to rewrite it as fiction in order to share it with others. " I couldn't let it go. I couldn't send this book out for people to read and buy." So she began rewriting the book as fiction about a year ago, and it was just published recently.

She drew from her experiences growing up in the Italian neighborhood in Cortland. Susan, her main character, is not allowed to marry the boy she loves, in a Romeo and Juliet style story. She goes through many challenges in her life, including having a child with a congenital heart defect. "Most of the story isn't me," Ms. Kone explains. "That part of it is. It's sad, but it's uplifting in the sense that Susan is able to pick up the pieces and move on. The ending is kind of a twist."

"A lot of it is about growing up in Cortland and growing up in the Italian neighborhood in the ethnic area where the railroad tracks really did separate. You had the blue collar workers on one side and the more affluent ones on the other. My grandfathers worked on the railroad. Since they were Italians who couldn't speak the language they were given the more dangerous, dirty jobs. The Irish, who were also immigrants from the same time period could speak the language, therefore they had the better jobs."

Ms. Kone has lived in Lansing since 1970. Though retired from the Lansing schools she continues substituting and working in the after school program. "I had a wonderful career at Lansing, made wonderful friends," she says. She also teaches summer School at the Gossett Center and works in the Ed Department assisting the Habilitation Director part time.

She began in the Lansing Elementary school, teaching first, second and fourth grades."When my daughter died she was in 6th grade. Her class was to the Middle School. I was teaching 4th grade and I decided to be there, because they were there." Sometimes that helped, sometimes it hurt. But Paula's classmates have kept in touch, inviting Ms. Kone to their weddings and including her in their lives.

Ms. Kone enjoyed novel writing. "I tended to work better in the middle of the night. Dave would bring me cups of coffee and I would type away. It's great to write, because you have all of this control. You name the characters, you put them in settings that you want. It's very empowering."

Yet she does not anticipate a sequel. "All my stories are here. I put my heart and soul into this. I would love to do a sequel, but I don't know. Probably not." However, she is thinking about writing a children's book.

Life is busy now with her husband, daughter, step-children and grandchildren. She enjoyed working with an editor and the process of getting the book into print. She is slowly working on publicizing it. And enjoying being a published author.

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