There are things that are not told because the shame could be too great, because the listener is not always willing to carry the weight of the pain. And the secret offers the opportunity to believe that nothing happened.
The author Antonella Lattanzi, after months of silence she has found the words to tell the unspeakable: “Things that are not told” (Einaudi, 2023) is a courageous autobiographical novel about her painful battle for motherhood. Winner of Wonderful Award 2024the novel is among the twelve books nominated for the Strega Prize 2024.
“Things that are not told”, the plot
After two voluntary abortions at eighteen and twenty, Antonella on the threshold of forty feels that the right time has come to have a child together with Andrea, her partner. If she didn’t want to before, because she was intent on realizing her biggest dream – becoming a writer – now she feels that the time has come to become a mother.
It is a book that talks about happiness, madness, guilt and guilt. A harsh confession in which Antonella tells her story path to motherhood, marked by the difficulty of getting pregnant naturally, and by the need to resort to MAP (medically assisted procreation) three times. The author stops at nothing, perhaps telling us more than anything else about the power of writing.
I also deserved what happened because, while I try to find the courage to write all this, I think: will it be a book? Will it be a good book? I deserved it because, even now, instead of just thinking about what happened, I’m thinking about writing. Even now that three little girls are no longer here.
In fact, Antonella is divided between the desire for motherhood and the release of a saving novel, “This day that looms” (HarperCollins, 2021) in which – as chance would have it – she brings together the joy but also the resentment that a mother can feel for their children. In between, the lockdown, the medical visits, the ultrasounds, the long hospitalizations, the silences, the resignation and the refusal to accept fate.
They told us they were three little girls the day before they died. How exaggerated you are, life.
Find the right words to use in these cases is an impossible experiment even for a writer, Antonella Lattanzi tries: pregnancy, pregnant, children, reduction… these are words that she will no longer use from the moment she discovers that she is pregnant with triplets, it is a high-risk pregnancy according to all hypotheses. However, they are the only words she can use to tell this story that is hers and that of all women – free, stubborn, ambitious, contradictory.
Antonella Lattanzi, writer and screenwriter, was born in Bari in 1979 and lives in Rome. He wrote the novels “Devozione” (Einaudi 2016), “Prima che tu mi tradisca” (Einaudi 2013), “Una storia nera” (Mondadori 2017) from which a film was made, “ Questo giorno che incombe” and the screenplays of the films Fiore (2016), “2night” (2016), “The champion” (2019), Nastro d’Argento for the first work.
In this novel he manages to put all the pieces together: the joys and sorrows, the times when she was torn between the desire to be a mother and her passion for writing, the times when she felt like the worst mother in the world and the days when she admitted that writing this book made her feel terrible.
It’s not a memoir, it’s not an outburst. “Things that are not told” is an angry novel, in all respects devastating, in which the author dialogues with the reader and with her doubts about parenthood: do I want a child? Will I be a good father/mother? What will become of me and my ambitions?
A novel recommended for those who are not afraid of the truth. It will be difficult to emerge unscathed and unmoved from reading him.
