Your daughter wants to start dating and tonight there’s a boy at the door. Opening it, your smile evaporates. He is scruffy, sullen and stares at his feet. In your culture, boys dress well and are good with mothers. Then it gets worse. Over his shoulder you see, gleaming in the streetlight, a motorbike, the rebel’s pride. On this he expects your daughter to climb, hoisting up her very best dress while trying to hide her undies.

Meet Christina Alibrandi, mother to one of Australian literature’s most feisty and indelible protagonists, Josephine Alibrandi. A teenage schoolgirl, Josie is just trying to get through one single year of youth, exams, boyfriends (motorbike optional) and parental complications.

Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi – reportedly the most stolen book from Australian high school libraries – has charmed, moved and entertained readers for 30 years. The story of a girl struggling to outrun the stifling expectations of an Italian-Australian neighbourhood became a family favourite for several generations.

Given Josie is the daughter of a single mother, she’s heir to the shame of her conception out of wedlock – a shame laid on thicker than gnocchi by a suspicious Italian nonna and her judgmental compatriots. There’s a cabal of spying grandmothers who telephone each other to gossip about a granddaughter seen out in skimpy clothing or with a boy at the beach.

Apart from the film released in 2000, Marchetta has fiercely guarded Alibrandi, rejecting all offers to adapt it – until now. Persuaded by Melbourne director Stephen Nicolazzo, she agreed to a new stage version, which premieres at the Malthouse Theatre this month, before travelling to Sydney’s Belvoir.

The idea germinated when Nicolazzo attended a directors’ lab in the United States, talking to peers about the work Australia produces. “It opened a conversation in my head, what is the Australian story I have to tell? I had worked with Christos Tsiolkas and had been developing adaptations of canonical Australian novels and I thought long and hard about what’s the story that has always touched me, and it was Alibrandi.”

Marchetta has given Nicolazzo free rein. For the plum role of Josie, there was never any doubt, he says. The film had starred a peppy Pia Miranda, but a 2022 audience was a different beast. “Before the script was written I always knew Chanella Macri would play her. She is the 21st century Josephine Alibrandi. She is an Italian-Samoan woman who grew up in the west of Sydney. To me, that’s who needs to be the representative of the questions raised by the play right now.”

Macri, who’s in her 20s, grew up in “white suburbia”, the child of an Italian father and Samoan mother. “By the time I was growing up, Italians were kind of exciting. Being Samoan was tricky, being brown was really hard. Being Italian was the equivalent to being white, but you ate better food.”

The book’s 30th anniversary may well spark renewed Alibrandi fervour. A new commemorative edition will be published in October, and Marchetta’s been asked to scrounge around under the bed for the original reviews that heralded a fresh, non-Anglo voice from the Sydney suburbs.

“When I wrote it, I was in a smaller world of believing that it would only be people like us relating to it. And of course, what we’ve all asked over the years is: who is people like us? It’s not just about your cultural background, it’s about a whole lot of other things, which has been amazing.”

Looking back on Alibrandi’s instant success, she reflects on the conditions that allowed Josephine’s story to emerge. “I was such an avid reader and I never saw traces of my life in the books I read … It was almost like, if I don’t exist in the pages of books, it means that I don’t exist in the outer world.”

Anglo Australia had yet to give voice to migrants beyond the occasional stereotypical portrayal. Yet Josie’s time had come. “It came out at a time where there was very little out there to do with cultural diversity,” Marchetta says. “I was one of the few kids at school who came from an Italian background who had an English-speaking mother. My mother was born in Australia, but everyone else’s parents were born overseas, Italian or Greek or Lebanese. So we were coming of age at that time and probably looking for something more than what was offered. It was also the rise of young adult fiction at that time.”

Coming of age crosses all cultures, guaranteeing the book universal appeal beyond its Italian wellspring. An 18-year-old who recommended the book to me said this is what it meant to her: “I’d just gone through a break-up and my first thought was, hang on, there’s that great book about the magic age of 17, and so I rushed to cram it in before I turned 18, to catch the main character on that arc. It was wonderful, it felt like I had a friend.”

And yet Alibrandi can become a favourite even if you’re neither 17 nor Italian. Marchetta is gratified, yet modest, about the wide appeal of what ostensibly seems a youthful odyssey. “What surprises me now is that it has stood the test of time, that a young person today can relate to this book so much. There was no social media, it’s such a different world. I think that regardless of whether or not you’re from an Anglo background, there’s an aspect of you that always feels as if you do not belong.”

What surprises me now is that a young person today can relate to this book so much.

Melina Marchetta

Josie is caught between Sicily and Sydney – where does she belong? Her heartfelt soul-searching provides many of the book’s comical moments, from hurling a science book at a rival to cheating on a walkathon, complete with the icy rage of nuns in sneakers.

The best description of Josie is of course Italian – she lives con brio, with verve. She’s tempestuous and funny. Loving, but a brat. Throwing meatloaf in the sink in a fit of rage, she silences her mother with: “too much oregano anyway”. Marchetta began the book in her late teens and the language captures the white heat of smart hormonal adolescents – sass not lost on imdb.com which includes a long list of zesty quotes on its Alibrandi film page (Marchetta wrote the screenplay).

Josie is confused by family secrets and resents the born-to-rule rich kids at her school, with their unthinking racism: “Money, prestige and what your father did for a living counted. If your hair wasn’t in a bob or if your mother didn’t drive a Volvo you were a nobody.”

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At home, Josie’s nonna seems unfathomably harsh – but when stories of the past emerge, she learns about the young Italian brides left alone in the bush while their husbands were off cutting cane, and abandoned even further when the men were interned during wartime. They were young mothers in a rough place where snakes slithered across the dirt floors and little boys drowned in creeks.

Making tomato sauce is a communion as the old ladies reminisce. “When it’s Italians reading about tomato day, they’re thinking I never thought anyone else went through that,” Marchetta says. “So there’s that idea that when you’re young you think no one else is going through this. And of course everyone’s going through it, they just don’t speak about it.”

The rapid success that followed the book’s release was at first “overwhelming”, but Marchetta still held down jobs in retail and later teaching, where she actually found herself teaching her own book to boys when Alibrandi was on the school curriculum. Did they read it differently from girls? “I think they saw aspects of their own life,” she says. “Feeling that she doesn’t belong, being suffocated by family. Their ideals and expectations. I think it was that aspect of the story that they related to, the rules that they had to deal with at school.”

Thirty years on, she thinks a reader might now be shaped by prevailing notions of consent, even domestic violence. “It was always fascinating having a discussion with the boys about one scene, whether Josie should have gone into the bedroom with a boy. And I think, well, none of that has dated.”

Marchetta says she resisted Alibrandi adaptations for so long because she was worried about how it would be interpreted. “You don’t want it to move away from the spirit of that original.” With Nicolazzo, it was different. He arrived in Sydney, they had coffee in an Italian cafe and the stories flowed.

“We are not the same. I mean, Italians have come from different regions, they have different dialects. But I loved that he spoke about his cultural background. Then he started sending me a few examples of Vidya’s writing and I just loved it.”

Vidya Rajan had the tall order of writing a theatrical script. “It didn’t step away from the sassiness or the energy of Alibrandi, but it was its own animal,” Marchetta says. “I don’t want to see a replica of what I wrote all those years ago. I just trusted Stephen and of course then COVID happened and it kept on getting put off.” The delay fortuitously took the production into the 30th anniversary year.

Although diversity is now much more a clarion call than it was 30 years ago, Nicolazzo says racism still stings. “I was always ashamed of being a wog as a child and a teenager in the late 1990s and 2000s,” he says. “I was the first person in my family to go to university, so I could relate to Josie’s struggle, the aspirations and expectations of redefining what your family looks like.”

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Is Australian culture and literature now better at telling different stories? “I still think there’s room for more,” he says. “Yes, we have Alice Pung and incredible writers like Melina and Christos still writing, but I still think those stories are rare, especially on stage. Literary circles have developed at a faster pace with those stories. Now the theatre world is catching up.”

He suggests Alibrandi readers might find different shades to its themes in his 2022 version. “We’ve focused on giving airtime to grandmother, mother and Josie. It’s not a teen flick. This is about the generations of women, which makes it more contemporary, and the adult concerns Josie faces particularly when it comes to sexuality and desire, the shame around that.”

Two genuinely shocking events towards the end of the book give it a powerful crescendo. The sweetness and confusion are curdled by lies. As 18 comes into view, we walk with Josie on her prickly path towards adulthood.

Macri remembers reading Alibrandi at high school and was most intrigued about the story between Josie and John Barton. “Like a lot of teenagers I’d had depression for years, so how Josie misses seeing this in John is how I remember the book.”

Among the kids who face discrimination, the stories are of course legion – sometimes complicated by the expectations of strict parents. Lucia Mastrantone, who plays Josephine’s mother Christina, grew up in Adelaide but was forbidden by her Italian mother to speak English. “Then as soon as I got to primary school the teachers said Lucia is Lucy in English and your surname is way too long, so they just shortened it to Martin.” She was Lucy Martin right through to her HSC.

As for Marchetta, she’s written numerous books since Alibrandi, for tots and teens. And she’s made her peace with the spying nonnas and the struggle between the old and new worlds, choosing to live in a neighbourhood with deep Italian-Australian roots. She has a daughter and they live with her mother, three generations echoing the family in her classic novel.

And if one day a poorly dressed, insolent young man comes down the driveway on a motorbike to collect her daughter, what then?

“I always say to her, of course you can date – when you’re my age. I want to be as open-minded as I can, but I think I’ll be in that incognito car driving behind them.”

Looking for Alibrandi is at Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre, July 9-31, and Sydney’s Belvoir Theatre, October 1-November 6.

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