Quello che so di te

There is a woman in this story who, faced with her newborn daughter, has only one certainty: from now on, she can never allow herself to go mad. Madness in her family is not just an abstract thought but has a name, and that name is Venera. A great-grandmother who has always had a special place in her dreams. But who was Venera? What was the event that led her to cross the threshold of Mandalari, the asylum in Messina, one day in March? To find out, it is essential to question family mythology, which, however, may lie, may be wrong, and may transfigure every episode with unreliable details. This is not only a story of women, but also of men. Of fathers with broad shoulders and long arms, good for throwing grenades in war. Of fathers who can be frightened, who can flee, who can lose their way. To tell the story of the women and men of this family, their downfalls and their stubborn courage, there is no choice but to accept the challenge: it is not enough to dream of the past, you have to go and get it. Returning to Messina, returning to the walls where Venera was interned and searching for a passage between the memories (or lies?) handed down, between invention and reality, between the responses of psychiatry and those of family stories. With these pages, Nadia Terranova delivers her most personal and intense novel, which questions the power of memory, both individual and collective, and our ability to traverse it in order to imagine who we are.