Introduction and Positioning

These texts were written in one go, following an intuition or responding to a need. Some texts are just a few lines long, others last several pages. There are reviews, poetry and political texts. In many cases, I don't mention the book cited in the title and the book just offers the opportunity to tell a memory.

The origin of this collection, the "100 Challenge," with its grueling rhythm of one text a day for a hundred days, dictated the pace of these works, which I present here edited and reviewed. These are the first texts I've ever written in a language that is not my native one.

With the exception of the first and last books, the choice of titles featured in the collection was completely random. Since there wasn't time to plan, every day I resolved to pick a book from the shelf from those I'd already read, and to write about it.

The reason there are so many Italian books is because I learned English very late, and most of the texts that shaped me were classic Italian Literature. The fact that I chose to feature only books written by women, however, has to do with the education I received: predominantly male, calibrated on the Cartesian epistemological primacy of rationality over everything else. I discovered that women existed in History and that women, too, had made History - and many other disciplines - very late. And since I'm convinced that "discovering" it earlier would have given me a different consciousness and another perspective on the world, I chose to list and comment only on female authors, thinkers, and artists. To give them back the space they didn't have in my education as a girl, and the importance they would have had on my perception of myself and of reality.

Each text I wrote addresses gender and intersects with other axes: class, race, sexuality, geography, ableism, colonialism, and the climate crisis.

Each one expresses a strong desire to be honest, to bring together pieces of life, experiences I thought were exclusively mine, but which over the years I have found politically criticized in essays, short stories, novels, and poems. I have described how these essays, short stories, novels, and poems have given me the tools, or even just the comfort, I needed to not look harshly at myself and at other women. I have described how these books have simultaneously been difficult interlocutors in challenging my prejudices, and important bricks of that bridge to the Other that constitutes the ongoing work toward complex thought.

My collection of writings exudes the urgency to highlight a metamorphosis, an awakening. That of my conscience. Recounting parts of my private life has allowed me to see, almost from the outside, the processes of my growth, passing through the different degrees of my ignorance, the different nuances of my anger, and the gradual dissolution of my naiveté as I grew into adulthood. The resulting picture is a landscape where contradictions and insecurities have been the price I paid every time I decided to push the line of my horizon further, along with a not inconsiderable veil of suffering and the unexpected flash of light of liberation.

The perspective of these works is therefore extremely personal: it is influenced by my own experiences, and by all their limitations. The narrator is a thirty-year-old, non-heterosexual, white, Italian woman, from a farming, migrant, and staunchly Catholic background, characterized by economic and social disadvantage and by a history of abuse and addiction, having been the first to go to high school and university.

I remember finding this type of presentation ridiculous when I first heard it from people in academic circles. Then one day someone asked me: "Where do you know from?". That's how I learned about knowledge positioning and how the geography of points of view is the basis to not elevate one's own experience to a universal system and to build an honest and constructive discussion.

The questions that guided the writing of these texts are diverse. I started asking myself: is it possible to go from being reactionary, misogynistic, sexist, and racist to being their exact opposite? And then: what is the role of culture in shaping people's mindsets and common sense? What is its actual power? What are its limits?

My storytelling is about this. It's about economic and social barriers, about how culture reproduces itself, about how no one is protected from their own biases, and about how important it is to continually question ourselves and engage with what is different from us. It's about how change is impossible when we've never had the space to look at ourselves from afar, and how it's possible when we sincerely need and seek it.