Alyssa Belfiglio

Alyssa Belfiglio writes contemporary fiction concerned with grief, family roles, memory, and relationships among women. Her University of Pittsburgh studies covered psychology and religious studies, and she lives in Philadelphia. You Don’t Know Nana is her debut novel and begins at a grandmother's bedside, where gifts and final messages unsettle assumptions held by her granddaughters. The story develops through pressures surrounding those women, including marriage, motherhood, work, and inherited expectations. Belfiglio's author site describes the book as contemporary fiction exploring womanhood and family dynamics, while her bibliography identifies a later work, When We Speak, We Speak to Strangers. Her academic background provides context for a novel organized around individual perception and family behavior, though the fiction remains focused on character rather than clinical explanation. You Don’t Know Nana establishes Belfiglio's interest in how relatives understand one another incompletely and how a death can reveal an older woman's independent history. The exact apostrophe in the title is part of the work's published identity.