Miss Giardino
One of Bryant’s most impactful works is her novel Miss Giardino, which has been described as a story of “how transmemory, or the intergenerational transmission of memory from diasporic to ethnic subjects, complicates ideas of Italian belonging” (Ferraro, “Place and transmemory in California Italian American literary narratives: Dorothy Bryant's Miss Giardino”). Miss Giardino tells the story of Anna Giardino, an Italian American schoolteacher, who struggles to remember her life after an accident. Miss Giardino was one of the most Italian American pieces she created, as she drew from personal experiences of growing up Italian American in San Francisco, and also primarily based the characters after some of her family members. saying in an autobiographical article that it “uses my mother’s childhood, making Anna's father a composite of my two grandfathers. Anna Giardino’s mother is like my father’s mother, a gentle creature” (Braynt, 53). In Miss Giardino, Bryant employs the action of remembering to create a first-hand experience for readers, evoking the feeling that the reader is living in that moment of recollection.