Mary Melfi's first novel explores the emotional trauma of infertility and its resulting marital conflicts. It is an intimate account of one woman's agonizing experience to carry a pregnancy to full term. Through Nina DiFiore's numerous miscarriages, Melfi analyzes how much women's self-image is linked to their fertility; for Nina, an artist, this is even more acute as she is of Italian origin, a culture which idolizes the role of the mother. Infertility Rites focuses on the difficulties for an Italian-Canadian woman in reconciling her alienation from aspects of her traditional immigrant past with her dislocation from mainstream Canadian society, embodied in the tensions within her marriage.