I have been writing stories, in my head, since I was a little girl. At age 34, I published my first novel, in English, not my native tongue. And I haven’t stopped writing since. Here, you will read about Los Angeles, about healing, about grief, about marriage, parenthood, love, food, basically all that I am.
RIGHT PLACE, RIGHT TIME… What about me? When is my time? Have you ever asked yourself these questions? I’ll return to this. In the past three weeks, I tried to write a new essay, but it was seemingly never the right time; I never seemed to be in the right place, or in the right state of mind. “Why is it taking me so long?”…
Ma is a Japanese word which can be roughly translated as “gap”, “space”, “pause” or “the space between two structural parts. Ma is not something that is created by compositional elements; it is the thing that takes place in the imagination of the human who experiences these elements. Therefore Ma can be defined as experiential place understood with emphasis on interval. A while ago I read…
Part 1 As I left the 101 South at Van Nuys, on Wednesday March 6th, at 11:30 am, local radio 88.5 played Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers’ Out In The Cold. I was headed to the Van Nuys County Registrar Office to get Catherine’s birth certificate (I can’t believe it’s been 90 days since her birth). Everything had seemed normal that morning: I was tired,…
“What the hell have I done?” I asked myself in tears. Catherine had been crying for an hour, I had been in my pajama pants since early in the morning, and the only reason why I was wearing my Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers sweatshirt was because she had spit on my pajama top, twice. My hair was messy and begged for a shampoo, the…
Who knows how long I’ve loved you You know I love you still Will I wait a lonely lifetime If you want me to– I will. I Will, The Beatles When it snowed in LA, in the 1980s, he made a snowball and kept it in the freezer for a week. This is just one of the little things that made me fall in love…
I love Pompeii also because of its history, or its fate, I rather say. For nothing like the sudden disappearance of an entire civilization is exemplary of the ephemeral nature of life and – as a direct consequence – of the importance of letting go of old ideas that don’t serve us any more, or of new obsessions that never will. The people of Pompeii had no idea that, from one day to the other, they would be buried in ash, and forgotten for more than 1600 years. This history test never fails to find me unprepared. I reference ancient Roman history because I had to let go of a lot in the past six weeks, from the very birth of Catherine, on December 16, 2017.
Giving birth has been such a transcendent, life-changing experience that I wanted to keep intact every memory. But I was also grieving who
I had been until then, not yet knowing who I had become.
Will you still be my mom in heaven? I’d ask my mom when I was a little girl. We lived in a very small apartment, and my feelings were so overwhelmingly big that they had never quite fit. Do you think we’ll still be married after we die? I asked my husband a while back. I was reading about black holes in the New…
I didn’t know that, with the joy of my much longed-for pregnancy, the horror of my bulimia and anorexia could come back so violently after three years of healing: with a vengeance, actually, despite intense and life-changing therapy sessions, sobriety, a happy marriage, and especially despite my newly found love for food and cooking. But it did happen. And my first trimester has been, almost…
I am always ambivalent about going back to Italy, where I was born and raised. And now that these three weeks of Italian Christmas vacation have come to an end, it’s time to look back and sum up all that has happened. First of all, Pilaz, a little mountain town in the Aosta Valley that I also call ‘my little heaven on earth’, and where…
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