When is a novel born? No, I don’t mean the moment when you sit in front of a blank page hoping that, little by little, it will become less and less so. I mean before, much before. The seed, I mean.
The seed of **The day everything changed **(Il Battello a Vapore, pages 176, €16), my first novel for girls and boys, was buried one late afternoon two years ago. It was summer and Elena and I, one of those friends who arrived in adulthood as a blessing, were wasting time and drinking beers in the book-besieged living room of my Milanese apartment. At a certain point, between a complaint about the excessive and underpaid freelance work and a disquisition-without-solution on the complexity/absurdity of love between human beings, I confess that I have always had this desire to write a book for young people readers. She, who works as an editor of books for young readers and who has one of the most fascinating curiosities I have ever come across, asks me: “And what should this book of yours be about?”. I then, nailed to the wall like a butterfly inside an entomologist’s box, try to answer her seriously, leaving aside the usual fantasies that my mind is so fond of: «Of a little girl who has a depressed mother and of the alternative female models that a little girl like this can meet in life».
I don’t know where I got that lapidary pitch (this is what a short presentation of your idea to any parties interested in acquiring or producing it is called in jargon). Inside, however, I realize that a lot of things were crammed in: what “being a woman” means for me – which as De Beauvoir says is not something that is “born”, but something that “becomes” -, the branches of disease whose shadow also extends over the people closest to us, the passing of the baton between different generations.
Elena then comments: «Ok, send me a synopsis». I break out in a cold sweat and reply: «Ok, I’ll send it to you». And I do it.
Today, April 2024: The day everything changedwhich for about twenty days has been absorbing the neon light on the tables and shelves of Italian bookshops, ALSO contains that succinct pitch which, however, has stuck so deeply and mixed with so many other things – growth, the first menstruation , the Resistance, the adventure – that sometimes I myself struggle to find it again. A novel, I understood while writing one, is a living being. And as with all living beings they grow as they must, which is something only they know how to do.
Now that I think about it better, however, the seed of The day everything changed it was buried even earlier. In one of the bookcases in my house, the one where “those books there” live – the Guides and Oracles among which I would recruit the One to take to the desert island -, I now notice at least five volumes which, in various capacities, deal with «how» children’s books are written and about it. In particular, there is one that has a date: Bologna, 1998. I have a very bad memory – one of the very few things that I have in common with Norah Ephron who, on this painful subject, wrote a brilliant book, I do not remember anythingwhich I periodically tell myself I should reread, but then promptly forget – and yet I remember that scene clearly.
