L’estate che ho ucciso mio nonno

You have to love your grandparents. Alice has heard this repeated since she was a child. But when her recently widowed grandfather comes to live with her and her mother, she realises that this commandment is impossible to follow. Although weak and depressed, Andrea imposes his brutal character on the whole household, reducing Alice’s mother Marta to a state of total servitude. It is as if an entire generation, with all its absurd and violent dictates, has crept into the lives of the two women, littering them with cigarettes, imperatives and blackmail. Alice’s anger grows, fuelled by the embers of her sixteen years. The mother she knew is disappearing, and she feels powerless: how can you free someone who does not want to be free? What is emancipation really? In a succession of carers who come and go, liberating binges with her closest friends, arguments with blind and deaf family members and a hunger that never goes away, Alice begins to harbour dark desires, to think things that should not be thought. Her journey into her mother’s past, to the village where she grew up, and the revelation of what has always been hidden from Alice proves to be a point of no return: Andrea must disappear. Is the only way to face a monster to become a monster yourself? L’estate che ho ucciso mio nonno (The Summer I Killed My Grandfather) tells, in a sarcastic, fragile and candid first-person narrative, how much it hurts to be sixteen, how many scars family ties leave behind, and how many demons the word “love” hides.