La gioia di ieri

The joy of yesterday

Who says the happiness we know is the only kind available? After a breakup, Anna is not ready to give up on love – but she does want to leave behind the tired scripts of romantic relationships: monogamy, betrayal, jealousy. She dreams of something different. Could happiness exist outside the traditional couple? Could love thrive where everyone is free to come and go, without exclusions? And if so, would it be enough to keep pain at bay? In this sensual and ironic three-act novel, La gioia di ieri explores a radical emotional shift. Anna, fifty years old, lives in a lively, messy household with her much younger roommate Micol – a clever, glamorous believer in monogamy – and a rotating cast of friends and lovers. As the world outside closes down in isolation, Anna finds herself on a more intimate, inner journey. Anna’s solitude takes the shape of a house that’s always open – and fairly crowded. There’s her roommate Micol, twenty years her junior, irresistible, devoted to artifice, slyly intelligent, and brimming with enthusiastic faith in monogamy. Then there’s the chaotic but essential group of friends with whom Anna dreams of starting a commune, along with lovers of all genders. And then, there are the dogs: her beloved Mina – aloof and vibrant –, pink puppies that look like fish, other people’s dogs she meets in the street and in parks, and a certain Frodo, with a gaze too human and too wise, who one winter day, instead of mating with Mina, decides (decides?) to leap from a terrace. In that jump, he carries Anna with him – or at least the life she’s known until that moment. Is it a miracle? An earthquake that reveals stars in place of the ceiling? Perhaps it’s none of that. Perhaps it’s just the way a new time makes itself known – a blurred and baffling time, where irrationality rules and the familiar rules of desire, which once saved her from sadness, no longer apply. Just as the events of the world force isolation on everyone and the lack of physical contact becomes an illness, Anna – now fifty – transforms. She enters this new phase of life while walking Mina through a half-empty city, dodging – or maybe embracing – the ambushes of nostalgia, bidding farewell to those who leave and waiting for those who always return. Because even when life feels dry and still, something – or someone – might still happen.