Richard di Donato cannot bear to visit his childhood home, a Cape Cod that sits in Strongs Neck, a peninsula on Long Island’s North Shore tucked just below the Sound. Three miles north of Stony Brook University, the hamlet is named for Anna Strong, part of the Culper Spy Ring during the Revolutionary War.

And it’s where, centuries later, Richard’s father, Pietro — the critically acclaimed but oft-overlooked American writer — laid the final bricks of his life before dying of bone cancer at age 80. Much like bricks in a building, bones are the framework of the human body, providing form and function until they no longer can.