Rye native Elizabeth Wellington Rollins’ debut novel is built around everything she received from her hometown.
“The Three Graces of Pearl Street,” a Book of the Month Club pick, is to be published this month by Atria/Simon & Schuster.
Rollins said she first became a reader at Osborn Elementary School, and developed a love of Latin and Art History at Rye Middle and Rye High School. As a child, she recalled, she went to Dock Deli (now Milton Point Provisions) on Saturday mornings before dance class, and regularly had dinner with her grandparents at Belluscio’s Restaurant (now Yaku). As a teenager, she frequented Sunrise Pizza on Friday nights with her friends and did homework at the Rye library “all the time.”
After graduating from Rye High in 2006, Rollins attended Davidson College and then spent over a decade as a freelance writer. While living in France and Spain, she wrote about food and travel for publications that included Vogue before settling in Pomfret, Vt., with her husband and daughter.
“The Three Graces of Pearl Street” follows three generations of women in an Italian-American family, the Valentinis. Grandmother Graziella raised mother, Grace, and granddaughter Ella on Pearl Street in Mamaroneck, but Ella has been estranged from the family for five years. A crisis pulls them back together both physically and emotionally to Graziella’s house on Pearl Street.
Rollins models Graziella on her own maternal grandmother, Lucia, who was born in Westchester to parents who immigrated to New York City from Italy. Lucia was one of five sisters who grew up around the Strawberry Patch neighborhood, also known as the Flats, behind the Mamaroneck train station.
The sisters were close their entire lives, cooking for each other and pouring themselves into each other’s children and grandchildren. Rollins said she wanted to show “the strength, compassion – and cooking abilities” of her Italian-American grandmother in the book. Her parents also grew up in Mamaroneck and ran local businesses; she was known around town as “Jeannie and Chuck’s kid.”
Her family gave her the characters, but Rye and Mamaroneck gave her the setting. There’s Walter’s Hot Dog Stand and Sal’s Pizza (called Norma’s in the book), as well as Harbor Island in the Mamaroneck Marina.
Pearl Street is in a small town. The Valentini women constantly run into people they know – some they want to see and some they don’t. Rollins knows that feeling well. She describes her emergency contact list as “five miles deep.”
Rollins based the characters and their trajectories in part on the myth of the Three Graces, which she learned in Latin class in Rye High.
“The Three Graces, which were known as the charities in Greek mythology, kind of represent three female virtues – radiance, joy, and blossoming,” she said. “In the ancient world, their iconography was everywhere, and they were a reminder to citizens that they needed to live in a virtuous cycle of generosity and reciprocity. So each Grace represented a stage of that cycle. So giving gifts, accepting gifts, and then returning gifts.”
The idea to bring the myth to Mamaroneck came to her in 2022 when her father, Chuck, died. Three months after having her baby, she returned to bury her dad’s ashes with her family at the Mamaroneck Methodist Church. Amid the grief on her flight home, a slice of pizza from Sal’s in her lap, the idea for the book crystallized.
Rollins launched her book Sept. 1 at a LitClub NYC Author Talk in Manhattan. She discussed the book Monday with famed local author and former Rye Record contributor Annabel Monaghan at The Rye Free Reading Room.
She credits her Rye teachers for much of the book. Anna Ziegler at Osborn helped her find her way as a reader. Monica Goldstein, whom she names in the book’s acknowledgments, kept her interested in literature.
In many ways, she has been writing this story her whole life. And now she’s coming home to tell it.
