Silvia, beautiful and fragile, is a girl bursting with vitality who wants nothing more than to be loved. One day, after a stolen kiss and a rooftop party, she discovers an insult aimed at her in the school bathrooms.
That word, that Event, wounds her in an indelible way, slipping into the cracks of a still-unformed personality and shaping her ability to love—and her life—forever. Twenty years later, the classic invitation to a class reunion to “catch up” reopens the wound.
Shame resurfaces and paralyzes her: what should she do? Avoid it? Or face the unjustified cruelty of her classmates, a cruelty that still burns?
Her invisible mentors will take her by the hand and guide her: the voices of Joan Didion, Annie Ernaux, James Baldwin, and many others will lead the protagonist through the labyrinth of memory, helping her decipher its mysterious mechanisms. After all, how much can our memories be distorted or altered by resentment and loneliness?
And why do we love—and then stop loving? A tender and fierce travel diary along the path that leads from our child self to adult life