Da parte di madre

Cheerful and enthusiastic, or melancholy and afflicted. Beautiful and fragile, with a gaze barely veiled by ‘certain stifled thoughts’. This is how Federica describes her mother, the ‘phantasmagorical blonde mum’ with histrionic gestures, elegant and casual bearing through which an irremediable insecurity transpires, in filigree. The author delves into her memory to compose the tender and disenchanted portrait of a woman full of light and shadow, and at the same time a sharp cross-section of a family framed in the bourgeois environment of Rome. With the gaze of a daughter, between the poignant desire to emulate and the search for her own identity, she observes her mother and deconstructs her. She sees her again by the telephone, like a moth around a light, checking her messages while waiting for a call from a man who doesn’t really love her. She sees her again as queen and then slave to her lovers – twisted lovers, made up of absence, desire, euphoria and denial. She sees her again as a mother and a woman, a model and then a cage from which to free herself. On the mother’s side it is the story of an unbreakable bond, of painful choices, of life that takes you and drags you away but in the end brings you back to where it all began: your first home, your mother. Federica De Paolis has written an adventurous, intimate, profound autobiographical novel made up of images, voices and atmospheres that transcend the personal story to transform themselves, with touching immediacy, into an existential parable that involves all of us. I thought love was a celestial body in which everything was possible: desire, euphoria, ecstasy, and then it would pass through a needle’s eye and plunge into a wasteland of jealousy, betrayal and fury. What remained were embers full of insomnia, waiting and smoke. My mother remained. She was always there.