Gessica Franco Carleverowas born in Canale in 1980 and lives in Marseille.
He directs the literary magazine La Bibliothèque italienne, a project aimed at promoting contemporary Italian literature in France, and works as communication and marketing manager for a winery.
Among his publications, the novel Half Guaro half Grappa, Fandango, 2006 (Awarded at the Festival of the First Novel in Budapest), the texts on creative writing Meravigliomente and A mente libera (Einaudi Scuola) and various collections published among others in Panta (Bompiani), L'accalappiacani (Derive and Approdi), The imagination, effe and L'inquieto.
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The final text is expected by the end of June 2023
Thirty-five years old and a hole in my head the circumference of a glass.
The protagonist began tearing out her hair as a child, when her father went into hiding due to gambling debts and her mother began a relationship with a violent and emotional underage boy.
Some children suffer the lives of adults waiting for time to pass, invisible to others and to themselves. They grow up unprepared and incapable, with the sole imperative of not repeating what they once lived.
After graduation, the protagonist doesn't know which direction to take and becomes involved with Giacomo, a Venetian boy she meets by chance.
They begin their adult lives together, working at a dating agency and writing theses for under-age students, waiting for a future full of opportunities that never arrives.
Seven years later I'm still at the same point, but without the expectation.
Until a child arrives and the decision to leave.
In the seventh month of pregnancy, for no apparent reason and without knowing a word of French, they loaded the boxes onto a van and left for Marseille.
After the initial period of excitement and disorientation, the situation begins to take shape. He finds work in a brasserie while she takes care of the baby.
And at that point motherhood turns out to be harder than expected. Idiosyncrasies emerge between the idea of an imaginary mother constructed during pregnancy, the reality of the facts and the memories of herself as a daughter.
In her new situation as a mother and wife, the protagonist finds herself experiencing some situations that her mother had faced in the past, with all the determination not to repeat the pattern, despite herself.
And the lack of the father, who never returned, and of the absent though present mother, continues to manifest itself in that hole in the head.
A tic, they said at the beginning, trichotillomania, is discovered much later, witness of the past that affects the present despite the will to avoid it.