As its title suggests, the novel is a family story, or rather several of them which form the matter of which Family Matter is made. They are primarily episodes about the narrator’s father, hospitalized for surgery when the novel opens. The stories expand in memory to cover the father’s early life in America, and then his origins in Italy where the narrator travels to pursue a secret he hardly knows exists–until, that is, he meets the intriguing Maddalena who, with her teenage daughter, not only lives in the house once belonging to the father’s family, but knows his story and the origin mystery that forms a key part of the tale. In pursuit of these revelations, the narrator upends his life and winds up in Naples as lo scrittore, the formal writer of the family saga presented here.