From that experience, among other things, I like to remember those seconds of immense silence that there were on the set, at the end of the photo shoot and the video interview with Michela. I tried hard not to get emotional, not to get a question wrong, to do everything without mistakes. When we finished talking, for a moment I looked up and saw all the stagehands, the make-up artist, the stylist, the film crew. Vanity and that of the photographer, the catering people and the logistics managers, all motionless, standing, in silence for more than an hour.
They were all crying. That lack of sound was interrupted by spontaneous, unexpected applause. Michela herself looked at that strange audience first with curiosity, then herself in tears. In the dressing room, a few minutes later, she said to me, “Thank you, today I looked as beautiful as ever and I’m as happy as if it were my birthday.”
How much we miss Michela. Every time I turn on the television, read a newspaper, look at a website or focus on a post or video on social media and come up against the vileness, backwardness and prejudices of certain contemporary politics and fascism, I realize how much is missing, how much we need his point of view, a vision that takes us beyond the mediocrity of present populism. She was right: they are trying to stop progress, they are doing their best to throw us into a distant past. One step at a time, one proclamation at a time, one forcing of the law at a time. They say and shout that we are the only thought. But they are the only thought, they are the gender dictatorship. It is their dictatorship, in fact, that makes us live only as they want, that makes us use our bodies only as they want, that makes us love only as they want. While we, as Murgia well argued, just want everyone to be free to choose.
To abort or not to abort.
To marry or not to marry.
To have children or not to have children.
To adopt them or not to adopt them.
To love who you want to love or not to.
To start a family, any family, or not to do it.
We want everyone to be free to choose.
We want everyone to be free.
They don’t.
Thanks Michela. Thanks for making us understand this even more.
Here is the extract from Michela Murgia’s posthumous book, Remember me as you like. In memory of me
Beppe Cottafavi explains in the book’s warning that «some answers given by Murgia in two interviews granted to Simone Marchetti for Vanity Fair, special issue directed by Michela, on 29 December 2023 and to Aldo Cazzullo for the Corriere della Sera, on May 23, 2023.
The cover of Remember me as you like. In memory of me by Michela Murgia (Mondadori, 324 pages, 19.50 euros).
