Know When to Run

By the author of The Wild Oats Project, a gripping memoir about trauma, resilience, and reconciliation that traces her fifty-year reckoning with the bookie father she could never outrun.

Robin Rinaldi was raised as the only daughter of a notorious Pennsylvania bookmaker who ran gambling junkets with the Bufalino and LaRocca crime families, amassed a million dollars in cash only to lose it twice, and skirted the law until he didn’t. But though Bob Rinaldi liked to brag of his ties to “the organization,” this is not a Mafia story. It’s the story of a complicated father and his eldest child, locked in a battle of wills the child was destined to lose. Running as far as possible from her father, Robin strives to recover from his violence and infidelities, yet is continually pulled back into the chaotic fold of her family — her troubled father, resilient mother, and three younger brothers.

Trailed by guilt, panic, depression, and physical illness, moving between the East and West coasts, Robin charts a messy path to healing as the rest of her family deals with the continual fallout. And yet, through all the trouble, moments of humor, warmth, and tenderness shine through. From childhood pool parties with her father’s strongarm debt collectors to 12-step healing circles in California, Know When to Run charts a fifty-year, bicoastal, intergenerational saga. Reminiscent of The Bear and The Sopranos, it brings us into the fold of a wounded, wild, intensely loyal Italian American family. At a time when so many adult children choose to walk away from difficult families, the Rinaldis show what it costs, and what it's worth, to stay.