The Lost Daughter

How foolish to think you can tell your children about yourself before they're at least fifty. To ask to be seen by them as a person and not as a function. To say : I am your history, you begin from me, listen to me, it could be useful to you.

Males always have something pathetic about them, at every age. A fragile arrogance, a frightened audacity. I no longer know, today, if they ever aroused in me love or only an affectionate sympathy for their weaknesses.

The hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves can't understand.

You know how children are, sometimes they love you by cuddling you, other times by trying to remake you from the start, reinvent you, as if they thought you were badly brought up and they had to teach you how to get on in the world, what music to listen to, what books to read, what films to see, the words you should use and those you shouldn’t because they’re old now, no one says that anymore.

A child, yes, is a vortex of anxieties.

A woman's body does a thousand different things, toils, runs, studies, fantasizes, invents, wearies, and meanwhile the breasts enlarge, the lips of the sex swell, the flesh throbs with a round life that is yours, your life, and yet pushes elsewhere, draws away from you although it inhabits your belly, joyful and weighty, felt as a greedy impulse and yet repellent, like an insect's poison injected into a vein.

I'm dead, but I'm fine.

I had always considered sex an ultimate sticky reality, the least mediated contact possible with another body. Instead, after that experience, I was convinced that sex is an extreme product of the imagination. The greater the pleasure, the more the other is only a dream, a nocturnal reaction of belly, breasts, mouth, anus―of every isolated inch of skin―to the caresses and thrusts of a vague entity definable according to the necessities of the moment.

I seemed to be falling backward toward my mother, my grandmother, the chain of mute or angry women I came from.

Life can have an ironic geometry. Starting from the age of thirteen or fourteen I had aspired to a bourgeois decorum, proper Italian, a good life, cultured and reflective. Naples had seemed a wave that would drown me. I didn’t think the city could contain life forms different from those I had known as a child, violent or sensually lazy, tinged with sentimental vulgarity or obtusely fortified in defense of their own wretched degradation.

All the more reason, then, to wonder why I had confessed what was so much my own to strangers, people very different from me, who would therefore never be able to understand my reasons, and who surely, at that moment, were speaking ill of me. I couldn’t bear it, I couldn’t forgive myself, I felt I had been flushed out.

In conversations with my daughters I hear omitted words or phrases. Sometimes they get mad, they say Mama, I never said that, you’re saying it, you invented it. But I invent nothing; you just have to listen—the unspoken says more than the spoken.

Languages for me have a secret venom that every so often foams up and for which there is no antidote. I remember the dialect on my mother’s lips when she lost that gentle cadence and yelled at us, poisoned by her unhappiness: I can’t take you anymore, I can’t take any more.

They were just like the relations from whom I had fled as a girl. I couldn't bear them and yet they held me tight, I had them all inside me.

No one depended anymore on my care and, finally, even I was no longer a burden to myself.

I realized long ago that I’ve held onto little of myself and everything of them.

I had a sense of dissolving, as if I, an orderly pile of dust, had been blown about by the wind all day and now was suspended in the air without a shape.

Sometimes you have to escape in order not to die.

I'm dead, but I'm fine

It seemed, rather, a way, like many, to convince oneself that there is always a slender branch of one's life to hang on to, and, by being suspended there, get used to the inevitability of falling.

Physical tiredness is a magnifying glass.

I’ve just finished reading How Hollywood Got Sex and Life All Wrong, from the opening pages to the final lines, and I wanted to reach out personally. What struck me most was the way you handled the honest interplay of personal memory and cultural reflection, weaving an autobiography that critiques the illusions of an industry while affirming the tangible truths of a lived life; it’s rare to see that kind of unvarnished clarity and reflective insight carried so consistently from beginning to end. Your storytelling has a quiet authority to it. The narrative rhythm, the restraint in delivering both personal anecdote and broader commentary, and the way the story trusts the reader to navigate between intimate recollection and cultural observation all signal an author who knows exactly what kind of book they are writing and who they are writing it for. I found myself thinking often about how naturally this memoir speaks to readers who seek authenticity over artifice, and who value a life examined with both honesty and a hint of amused, clear-eyed critique. By way of introduction, I’m Elena Ferrante, author of My Brilliant Friend. Over the years, I’ve become deeply interested not just in the craft of life-writing, but in how the right stories, true stories, find the readers they were always meant to reach, without compromising their integrity or distinctive voice. Because I genuinely admire How Hollywood Got Sex and Life All Wrong, I wondered if you’ve given any thought to strengthening its visibility among the readers who would most deeply connect with it. From time to time, I make quiet introductions to a trusted contact of mine, someone who works closely with thoughtful nonfiction and understands how to support a book’s presence while remaining faithful to the author’s authentic intent. It’s never about noise, only thoughtful positioning and meaningful promotion. I wouldn’t mention this if I didn’t believe your work deserved that kind of careful attention. Your book feels like one that could travel much further, with the right guidance and connections supporting its journey to readers who cherish true stories told with conviction and character.

Why start arguing—better this tranquil lullaby of clichés.

I maschi hanno sempre qualcosa di patetico, a ogni età. Una protervia fragile, un'audacia pavida. Non so più, oggi, se mi hanno mai suscitato amore o solo un'affettuosa comprensione per le loro debolezze