Exactly One Hundred Years Ago Today, Violet Gibson Attempted to Assassinate Mussolini

Excerpt from “Shooting Mussolini” in my forthcoming hybrid essay collection The Lunatics’ Ball:

“The woman who shot Mussolini was a religious mystic. Or she wasn’t. She was a political fanatic. Or she wasn’t. She was crazy. Or she wasn’t. You wouldn’t need to be crazy to be anti-Fascist in 1926.

The woman who shot Mussolini said that God had directed her to do it, and that an angel steadied her hand when she held the gun.

The woman who shot Mussolini wasn’t successful in killing him, despite the assistance of an angel…”

When I read the title flash from The Lunatics’ Ball at the Sycamore in San Francisco (in the launch for the paperback release of Sasha Vasilyuk’s novel Your Attendance is Mandatory last December), I found it unexpectedly difficult, unnerving even. With the exception of Sasha and Olga Zilberbourg, I didn’t know most of the people there. The reading was packed, the funky patio setting behind the bar was intimate, everyone was friendly, but now I wonder: am I ready to “come out” as bipolar by reading the memoir pieces in the book?

Gertrude Stein said that she wrote for herself and strangers, and I get it. I’m still nervous when I publish revealing creative nonfiction (what will my friends/acquaintances/students/extended family make of this?), and reading revealing creative nonfiction with live bodies in a room makes me nervous too (will people feel compelled to say something about the content rather than the writing? Give me personal advice? Say nothing at all? Will they think of me differently?).

Reading my (non-memoir) flash “Shooting Mussolini” from The Lunatics’ Ball at the launch for Patricia Q. Bidar’s flash collection Pardon Me for Moonwalking at Books on B in Hayward was much easier! It was great reading with friends—Patricia and Lynn Mundell and Dawn Tasaka Steffler, and with friends in the audience, and in my favorite indie bookstore, whose owner, Renee Rettig, is one of my favorite people.

Patricia, Dawn, me, Lynn

I enjoyed reading it so much that I read “Shooting Mussolini” again for a completely different audience at the Irish-American Crossroads Literary Salon last weekend. It really was the way I imagine nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary salons to be, all of us sitting in a large circle in the living room of a stately 100-year-old mansion in San Francisco with a panoramic view of the hills and bay, a grand piano in the front window, talking Ireland, and literature, and politics, and religion, in between each reader. They had interesting questions for me about the treatment of mental illness and women. So often when I describe my project, people tell me about someone in their family, an aunt, a grandmother, who was institutionalized. A salon participant told me about a great aunt indefinitely institutionalized in an asylum because of menopause.

I closed by reading Sean Thomas Dougherty’s wonderful flash essay “The Plough and the Stars,” which we published recently in CRAFT. Here’s an excerpt. You should read the whole flash!

Excerpt: “What did I know of being a man, back in another century,” Dougherty writes, “as I sat in that bar off Massachusetts Avenue, with the older men talking about the Red Sox, and so-and-so’s wife passed on, the saint she was, and the way their kids were hanging on, or what about the weather? I didn’t listen to what I should have back then. No one talked about the Troubles, which only the much older men called it, as the young talked about jobs and girls. But everyone knew a man who knew a man, even across an ocean, and even the man I worked for in the factory in New Hampshire was heard to have run guns or money, or money and guns, though looking back probably both was the correct answer. It was a time of secrets not said at bars.”

The Irish “lunatic” Violet Gibson, the subject of my flash “Shooting Mussolini,” spent thirty years involuntarily incarcerated in a mental asylum in England after she attempted to assassinate Mussolini. (The same mental asylum where James Joyce’s daughter Lucia, much younger than Violet, was also incarcerated for life.)

Today is the centenary of Violet’s assassination attempt on April 7, 1926.

There’s a lot more to say about Violet and Lucia, and I hope you’ll read about them when The Lunatics’ Ball comes out in a year. For a full list of the lunatics at the ball, read my previous Substack on why I wrote the book and who’s included.

Here’s Mussolini with a bandage on his nose, and Violet’s mugshot from her arrest in Rome.

And here’s the Irish folksinger Lisa O’Neill telling Violet’s story and performing her song “Violet Gibson” at a concert in Dublin in 2018.