The writer died at her home in Rome Ada d’Adam. She was born in Ortona, in Abruzzo, in 1967, she was 55 years old and had been ill for some time. She had just entered the dozen of the 2023 Strega Prize with “Like air”, his debut novel published in January 2023 by Elliot, but he was unable to attend the press conference due to his condition. But as per the regulation, the novel, underlined at the Bellonci home, remains in the race for the 2023 Witch Prize. In the book, written over many years, which has received extraordinary and unanimous approval, a mother tells her disabled daughter about the discovery of the disease.
Graduated in Performing Arts and graduated from the National Academy of Dance, she had written various essays on theater and contemporary dance. Great expert in children’s books, she collaborated as editor with Gallucci. Adam leaves behind her husband Alfredo and a daughter, Daria. The funeral will take place on April 3 at 12 in the Church of Sant’Eusebio all’Esquilino in Piazza Vittorio.
The book “As of air”
In the book, “Come d’aria” the writer recounts the birth and early years of her daughter Daria, suffering from a serious congenital disease. When the writer discovered she had a tumor and needed treatment, her main fear was that she would no longer be able to have physical contact with her daughter. “Will I end up melting into you? I’m Ada. I’ll be air…” is the incipit of the book.
In the novel he tells of his relationship with his daughter, whose fate has been marked since birth by one lack of diagnosis. Ada her mother, on the threshold of fifty years she discovers that she has fallen ill in turn. This discovery becomes an opportunity for her to address this directly magical girl and tell her their story. Everything passes through the bodies of Ada and Daria: daily struggles, anger, secrets, but also unexpected joys and moments of infinite tenderness. Words cross time, in a constant intertwining of past and present.
“Come d’aria” does not end with this, however, but takes on traits of universality, because what interests the author, who was a dancer and choreographeris the body. When she gets sick she can’t accept that she can no longer keep up with Daria. Reflects on the mockery of having a daughter who does not control her movements when she, with the dance, was aware of the smallest movement of the smallest part of her hand. “For years she has sought the grace of the gesture”, used to keeping even “the position of a little finger” under control and finds herself grappling with “a body completely out of control, a back and a head unable to stand straight” and in the end even with damage to one’s body, for a serious breast cancer. In the book you say that “first of all you need a physique to have a disabled child”, it is demanding and tiring. Nevertheless it is not the body the substance of this narration always vigilant and lucid, which narrates failures and fears, but also courage and will and strength as natural elements of accepting life, of suffering it and rejoicing in it by learning something with love every day, what one gives and what you receive.
In this case there is the good fortune of always being three, reunited with the initials right in his name, Adawhich contains Daria in the center and then Alfredo, her partner and father, because the disease can destroy but also “multiply love” and overcome those moments in which the normality of others, their life which flows as before, which has not changed, digs into your intimate loneliness, and you wonder how you managed not to collapse. The novel is a constant reflection on the limits imposed by ours mortal condition: the birth of Daria, the love and suffering for her, the radical transformations she caused, the arrival of cancer are steps in a path of pain and anger, which D’Adamo lived and describes above all as moments of progressive acceptance and constant presence. For all this, in his truth, “Come d’aria” is an ode to care.
“The death of Ada D’Adamo it saddens us deeply. There wasn’t time to get to know her, yet – they say to the Witch – we loved her thanks to her book. In presenting ‘Come d’aria’ to the public Elena Stancanelli, who proposed it to the Strega Prize, said that ‘meeting this story is a gift’. Well, it’s a consolation to know that the writer’s words will continue to reach her readers. The emotional embrace of the entire Steering Committee of the Strega prize goes to her loved ones ”.
