Lost on Me: Reading Notes
By Monica Sharp
How to use these Reading Notes
The Open Doors Review reading group gathers four times a year to read Italian literature in English translation. Narrated in a voice as wryly ironic as it is warm and affectionate, our second selection, Lost on Me, seductively explores the slippery relationship between deceitfulness and creativity. The novel resists summary without resisting pleasure: funny, structurally surprising, and doing what effective autofiction always does by making us question what we know about memory, family, and the stories we tell to survive. Veronica Raimo is not yet as widely read in English as she deserves to be.
For this first attempt at reading notes, I have organized observations by quarter, roughly fifty pages at a time, as jumping-off points rather than a guide. I welcome your responses and hope we find our footing together.
We warmly invite you to join us live online on June 15 for a conversation about Lost on Me with Lauren Mouat of Open Doors Review and Alexandra Lawrence of Illuminare. We will also be joined by the books English Translator Leah Janeczko.
Quick note on spoilers
These notes follow the book closely and do not shy away from plot details. If you prefer to encounter the novel without foreknowledge, please read each section before consulting the corresponding notes. They are intended as companions to your reading, not substitutes for it.
Author Veronica Raimo
(b. 1978, Rome) is a novelist, translator, and screenwriter. She is the author of four novels, including Lost on Me (Niente di Vero, 2022), which was shortlisted for the Premio Strega and won the Strega Giovani Prize and the Viareggio Rèpaci Prize, and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2024 in Leah Janeczko’s English translation. She has translated into Italian works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Octavia E. Butler, Ray Bradbury, and Ursula K. Le Guin, and co-wrote the screenplay for Marco Bellocchio’s film Bella addormentata (2012). She lives in Rome.
Translator Leah Janeczko
is an Italian-to-English literary translator originally from Chicago. Over more than 25 years she has translated fiction for readers of all ages, including works by Rosella Postorino and Roberto Piumini. Her translation of Lost on Me — longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2024, an award that recognizes authors and translators equally — has been praised for preserving Raimo’s comic timing and distinctive voice. She also writes original song lyrics in English for Italian bands. Leah has lived in Milan since 1991.
Your guide, Monica Sharp
is an American writer, editor, and polyglot based in Florence, Italy, where she has lived since 2016. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Open Doors Review and the Pure Slush Great Cities series, most recently Vol. II: London. She serves as submissions editor at Open Doors Review and is a founding member of the Florence Literary Society. She holds a BA in Letters and an MA in Spanish Literature from the University of Oklahoma and reads in five languages. Find her at sharpmonica.com and monicasharp.substack.com.
Note from Monica
For the past five or so years, I’ve been reading classic and contemporary literature with APS Together out of Brooklyn — and their reading notes have been one of my favorite parts of the experience: short, sharp, and always worth the few minutes they take. I loved them so much that I asked Lauren and Alexandra if I could try my hand at something similar for our group.
I hope you find these useful — and that they accompany your reading. As always, they’re completely optional. Dive in as much or as little as you like.
Happy reading!
Reading Notes: Lost on Me by Veronica Raimo
(Page numbers refer to the translated edition published by Virago in 2024.)
Chapter 1 (page 3)
The basic cast: the narrator, her mother, her brother, and her father.
The mamma: neurotic and cannot be appeased. The brother: living his own very public life as an elected official.
The mother cannot control her panic and anxiety about her imagined visions.
Interesting: home as stage. Sliding doors do not lock, and constantly shifting, reconfigurable boundaries can be rearranged according to the needs, whims, or tendencies of the father. These will be moved around. Boundaries are not what they may seem.
Chapter 2 (page 8)
How often have we ruminated over some childhood misdemeanor or misstep, only to discard it just as easily a few moments later.
The narrator further fleshes out her family for us. Her elder brother Chri: the golden boy, crowned by their mother. Alongside him, Vero is somebody whose own achievements and talents must be fabricated, because she cannot possibly rise to his level.
To represent her own gifts, she steals two paintings at school and passes them off as her own. Just half a step from Marcel Duchamp’s toilet.
The inherent gender politics of Italian culture are also very much on display here. The brother is the golden boy. The girl is a thief.
The narrator’s apocryphal response, in the form of a novel to the students from whom she stole the paintings, gives us a greater clue to the true identity of the narrator. We feel the conflicts among what her mother saw in her, what her mother wished for her, and what was actually happening.
Chapter 3 (page 13)
The father is a chemist.
Vero and Chri feel deeply isolated from the rest of the world and hone their powers of narrative and observation regarding global issues like Chernobyl or the cruelty of neighborhood children kicking a toad around until it dies. Vero ruminates on these memories and obliquely connects them to their budding careers as writers.
When she describes discovering reading — the way meat sinking into a puddle of milk becomes soft — I felt seen. As a young girl, reading was that escape for me, making me tender in the same way that a wise Italian nonna in Emilia-Romagna will start her ragù by first soaking the veal in milk.
Take an isolated child. Soak in literature for years. Result: author.
Chapter 4 (page 17)
Hard to imagine playing their banal game of dice all afternoon, not just one summer, but summers in a row. The stultifying monotony of anxious parents.
She cheated at the dice game and wonders if her brother noticed. His Brava may have been sarcastic一the outcome of her dice rolling defied all rules of probability.
Again, another piece of the puzzle in the groundwork for how a writer is formed, how a child becomes a fabulist, how cheating gives way to a story. How retrospection reveals insight (oh, he might have said “brava” sarcastically!). How books can act like drugs by stimulating the dopamine response to anything drug-adjacent that is not an actual drug: food, film, travel, shopping, lust.
Chapter 5 (page 20)
Anyone who survives childhood has enough information about life to last them the rest of their days.
Carson McCullers
So much is relatable. The protagonist’s running away from home — the boyfriend she got together with just so she could say goodbye, the romantic fantasy she had about how her escape would unfold. The 24-year-old stoner friend she knows only because he works at the gelateria; the ex-boyfriend who has gone to Ireland with a new girlfriend with dark roots.
All these details continue to point us toward a teenage girl destined to become a writer. (She fails to even realize she has been supplanted by the new, more monied girlfriend. O youth!)
The detail at the end of this chapter about Anastasia’s dark roots is perfect. Vero deconstructs in a trice what strangers, acquaintances, friends, and family all want her to believe about them.
She sees through them. She exposes and refutes their versions of reality.
Ah, so – an author.
Chapter 6 (page 29)
“Francesca’s on the phone” is the safe phrase — which sends me back to Mama Bueno, a the mother of a friend and a psychiatric nurse who could find our high school friend Dave anywhere, even before cell phones.
Our own safe word in our twenties: Buddha. Give me a B! The password to our circle.
Vero and her new friends land in a hot tub with near-complete strangers at an unknown address. I remember this age. What could possibly go wrong?
Her mother finds her anyway and her father drives them home. Everyone smells like coconut fragrance. Thus is adolescence earmarked: Rome in the 1980s, coconut bubble bath, dad at the wheel. Core memory.
Vero stumbles into a liaison with her brother’s friend Loris — something she says that she makes happen without a thought to his needs, wants, or life goals. How difficult it is, as an adolescent, to make economic sense of the world. Anyone with more capital than you — not just money, but a job, a car, keys to somewhere you’re allowed to be — enters your social calculus and determines what your compliance — or resistance.
Chapter 7 (page 34)
The narrator loses a version of virginity because her mother’s colleague offers her a ride back to the theater where her mother is working. Thanks to her mother’s warnings throughout childhood (more cultural gender politics, with added strident Catholicism and another dose of fioretti), she is so terrified of the so-called Lecher that she has wets herself in the back of his car. She is too afraid to tell him. The man, who is definitely not a threat, takes her to a bathroom, cleans her up, dries her off, and deposits her back at the theater. Vero throws the hair dryer away out of shame.
A secret like a discovery that was all mine — I took my hands off my lap and crossed my legs for the first time in my life.
This could just as easily be describing a first sexual encounter, or even a first sexual assault. If you are a 14- or 15-year-old girl, what palette of emotional responses do you have available to accurately describe what happened to you, and your response to it?
The theatrical theme runs through this chapter again. The mamma, a theater designer, director, setter of scenes and costumes, creates her tableau of characters, moving them around, while the daughter and son, both writers, are creating characters in their literary imaginings and confabulations.
End week 1.
Thanks for reading with Open Doors Review! Join us for a live discussion of Lost On Me on June 8.
Chapter 8 (page 39)
The narrator discusses her constipation, a metaphor for writing — the feeling that you cannot get something out that wants to come out, the struggle, the disgust that it will not come out, maybe never emerge.
The key to this whole chapter is the ethical principle of her Nonno Pepino: there is nothing so disgusting as our own disgust.
Raimo is preparing us for what may be the “disgusting” depths into which the upcoming chapters will descend.
Is the most disgusting thing truly our own disgust?
Chapter 9 (page 45)
Veronica describes all the names she’s answered to, including Oca (“Goose”), an Italian pejorative.
Another Italian in Berlin. Much like the Latronico …. I had no idea young Italians were dying to get to Berlin.
Without a fixed name, without a fixed home — in fact she enjoys trying on other people’s lives.
The perfect writer: someone who gets under the skin of her characters and lets people transpose their expectations and prejudices onto her. How common is this among writers? I can change my name and my address without changing my identity and have joked that I can feel at home after three days in a foreign city. How long does it take you to make a new home?
I have also answered to many variant names and nicknames, both affectionate and faux-pejorative. Is this common? Do you?
Chapter 10 (page 49)
Insomnia and diagnosis: you probably don’t have insomnia, it’s a bad attitude.
Her ancestral temper, seething beneath the surface, keeps all the muscles in her body active.
How difficult it must have been to locate and maintain tranquility in a household with a snoring, screaming father. The fight-flight-freeze response must have been frozen — or perhaps locked on fight, if she really is as angry as she describes. How could it be otherwise with a father whose normal speaking voice scares off her friends?
Until I started numbering these chapters I struggled to keep track of where I was in the book. Does that simply emphasize the hopscotch quality of this book — like Julio Cortázar’s famous Rayuela? Does the order of the chapters matter?
These chapters could conceivably be read in any order at all, and we would still come to know the narrator as well as we do reading them in their published order.
Chapter 11 (page 57)
Veronica pretended to be religious to please her brother, then to please Don Serafino. At her baptism she couldn’t manage the simplest catechism response — the priest dunked her anyway.
Chernobyl happened forty years ago. I was Vero’s age then, trying to make sense of news where what wasn’t being reported was more frightening than what was.
Don Serafino turns up next as a teacher at her middle school — Teddy Boy jeans, attractive, the only single man in the building. Every teacher finds an excuse to talk to the priest. He leaves the priesthood, marries, has children. She sees him again ten or fifteen years later: wife looking old, Don Serafino looking portly.
Time passes for us all. None of us inhabit a fixed character.
A use-and-toss conversation with her brother about Italian politics. He’s too distracted to engage; she takes his input somewhat seriously, meaning not at all; he returns the favor. Does anyone ever truly communicate?
Chapter 12 (page 63)
Her religious brother is cheating on God with Freud — he is in analysis. A wonderful opening line.
Veronica was most comfortable with her grandfather. The imago of psychology: Peppino’s imprint marked the men she’d be drawn to.
What does it mean to look like you’ve cohabited with someone for fourteen years? My guess: Vero is too independent, too offbeat, too rough around the edges.
Her nonni were eternal roommates, more cohabitants than a couple. The very relationship whose imprint she doesn’t bear, even after fourteen years.
Nonna Flora: deluded, deranged, talking to the TV, talking to the Pope, having her magical angel costume made.
Nonno Peppino: shoemaker turned factory worker, sold his Trastevere apartment and robbed the narrator of a valuable inheritance.
Veronica shared a bed with Peppino until she was a teenager. When she finally decided to go home — the first conscious decision of her life — he did not acknowledge the end of this idyllic chapter. She will never learn to eat a chili pepper without crying.
Flora dies. Peppino refuses to go to the hospital. He’s already said his goodbyes. How many of us have done this when the person we remember departed before their body.
Peppino follows Flora in death by a few months. Veronica’s mother is perversely glad: his funeral keeps her children out of the G8 protests in Genoa.
The last line strikes like Peppino’s pronouncement about disgust: the only immoral principle Vero’s mamma recognizes is her own anxiety.
Chapter 13 (page 73)
Veronica’s father is terminally ill. Vero realizes that she too needs to say her goodbye in the same way that she once judged her grandfather for doing.
Once she says goodbye, she’s done.
She becomes a hospital automaton. I’m not sure I could manage that.
Back in Berlin, she can’t understand how people on the street move without carrying a dying body. She watches the briefest of touches — as she once watched children kick a toad to death, wishing she could join in. Perhaps she is not lost on herself.
Vero is struggling through a grief that she cannot recognize or name.
Three months in Berlin, then back to Rome, back to her boyfriend — his body thankfully his own again.
Guilt persists. The father’s cemetery is hard to reach. The brother pays for a memorial Mass she can never attend due to the Berlinale. The mother texts her. Even in the skies over Berlin you’ll find your father’s angel — proud of her Wenders reference.
Grief hangs on in the clothes she keeps. And this poignant detail: her father routinely bought shoes a size too large, embarrassed by his small feet. The son of a shoemaker.
At the end, a picture on her desk — her father beside a colleague she can’t quite crop out. People ask who the older man is. She’s not ready to say. Who’s the short guy? Maybe someone else’s desk, somewhere, holds the same question in a frame.
Chapter 14 (page 80)
Family, culture, expectations all converge in the form of a bill for an electric candle at the in-laws’ cemetery plot.
Nonna Muccia’s favorite grandchild is the brother. Naturally. The golden boy. She was a model widow: fresh acconciatura, fresh pasta, impressive bosom.
Veronica is flat-chested. People keep buying her bras she’s too superstitious to discard. Her mother buys infant clothes for grandchildren who will never arrive. Veronica has made her choice.
Then, in staccato, these shocking revelations: the grandmother tried to abort the narrator’s mother with a coat hanger. She was seventeen and already had two children. Did she ever have a chance at her own identity?
Could Vero and nonna Muccia ever feel mutual affection? They didn’t. Veronica’s very existence must have tormented nonna Muccia — the life unlived, standing in the room, flat-chested and childless and free. What jealousy, alongside an inability or unwillingness to name it.
How often we resent the people who live out what we might have wanted for ourselves.
The further I get, the more this novel reads like cultural anthropology — the narrator turning herself and her family over like artifacts, looking for sense.
Nothing makes sense. Can anything?
Can we force things to make sense? Or do we fail to see the sense?
Why do we want things to make sense?
End week 2.
Thanks for reading with Open Doors Review! Join us for a live discussion of Lost On Me on June 8.
Chapter 15 (page 86)
Puglia became a popular tourist destination a while ago. The story here concerns a time when Puglia was a backwater, a family summer holiday.
Veronica has no identity until the neighbors can place her on the family tree.
Zio Uccio traps her in the bathroom under the pretense of needing a comb and pulls out his penis. Veronica flees.
The Romanian badanti, we are told, “get fucked” by the hubands as soon as the old women they care for fall asleep. Caretakers are neither respected nor cared for themselves.
Everyone in this version of Puglia is out for themselves. A road trip becomes a horror scene when they come upon an accident. The aunt immediately assumes that the injured, bleeding woman is a prostitute. The family gawks at the fatally injured other three people at the bottom of the cliff. They do not call for help. They get back in the car and drive away.
This moral misjudgement is lost on me.
The fear of being a good Samaritan and being taken in, robbed, or killed.
Why did they drive away?
Chapter 16 (page 91)
The patriarchy is on parade: an endless parade of dicks.
Veronica’s brother has a crush and walks to school with the crush instead of his sister, leaving Veronica to get flashed by a random man on the street. Her mother finds out, marches her back, and announces to the school that the girl believes she has seen a wiener. Mortifying. Classmates offer to show her theirs. The harassment ends only when the hottest boy in school puts his penis into a girl’s hand in the bathroom.
The neighborhood was full of flashers — behind shrubs, behind trees, under trench coats.
Something similar happened to me in 1993 as a teenager in Spain on a study abroad program. Sunrise in a city park, a man with a beret and a round belly in his mid-sixties, smoking an acrid cigar with one hand and, with the other, having himself a nice wank. I was shocked first by his bored pink penis, and second by his nonchalance.
Then a naked stranger with an erection appears beside Vero on an isolated beach. He will not go away. The solution: call her brother, have him talk Roman politics, wait until the man loses his erection and leaves.
The chapter closes on something darker. Her brother’s political positions curdle into threats on social media — toward Veronica, toward their mother. Any stance he takes in support of immigrants draws commenters wishing the worst sexual violence upon his mother and sister.
A parade of dicks, indeed.
Chapter 17 (page 98)
Perestroika was the splotch on Gorbachev’s forehead. I laughed out loud at this. In 1986 I thought so too. They had to be related somehow?
More illness. Rheumatic fever, and her OCD father with his roll of paper towels and rubbing alcohol ready to go.
The family has a generational/cultural aversion to bathing. Perhaps rooted in Catholic guilt? The mother, hissing to her showering daughter: get your hands off yourself. How else is she meant to wash? In every way the mother continues to lurk in the background, commenting, judging, assuming. I am being driven nuts just reading this. When I was pregnant with our first child, an Italian woman ruined a work dinner for me by hissing at me that I should not touch myself.
The image of Vero’s brother reading aloud to her: Animal Farm, The Brothers Karamazov. What sibling devotion. And now they’re both successful writers.
An endless parade of unrequited and intense crushes: Stefano Bellucci, Dr. Del Bosco.
Followed by Fausto the nurse. No nonsense, bad jokes.
Chapter 18 (page 106)
We’ve reached the height of paradox. I am totally going to steal this.
Sweat and blood…. Tears can’t be far behind.
For a father who refused to let his daughter venture forth lest she suffer injury, the tale of the heart-shaped scar shocks.
The inescapable blowback: leather boots two sizes too large all summer long at the beach. This poor teenage girl doesn’t stand a chance.
An adolescent concept of sex appeal as seen through the lens of Susi and the Settimana Enigmistica. It’s hard to overemphasize the importance of this publication in Italian popular culture. A bit like TV Guide for Americans. O to return to a World Before Internet!
Ventotene! Who among us does not harbor an aspirational holiday destination like this?
A mother with undiagnosed depression. A father who never asks and never accepts, sending back unopened gifts every time. A paucity of acceptance. A tragic lack of warmth.
Ventotene! Who among us has had an aspirational holiday destination destroyed thus?
Remembering her father’s voice, always through an imagined phone call. How the heart copes with separation by death. She misses his nervousness, his chain smoking, his OCD and paper towels and rubbing alcohol, the incessant warnings for safety’s sake. All who have suffered grief know these feelings.
How I wish the past always worked like that.
What a phrase.
Chapter 19 (page 118)
An anagram for Veronica Raimo is I crave no amori. The height of paradox.
I was speechless as I beheld his silhouette slowly rising against the red of the sky, halfway between Venus and Christ.
This sets up the reader for the wittiest riposte ever to What’d you do this summer?
I knew the Absolute.
And then:
Knowing the license plate of the Absolute won’t help you reach the Absolute.
Magnificent.
Further disastrous adolescent crushes. The homeless Laszlo. The much-older Diego. The Russian poet, cajoling: You can start a new life for yourself in Moscow.
How did the protagonist survive adolescence?
Maybe her parents were right. She needs to be protected at all costs.
Chapter 20 (page 122)
Veronica’s parents probably struggled with infertility. Myths offered and punctured. Back then, infertility was barely spoken of, much less frankly, nor addressed.
Her father’s quip: Be serious. Like I would go there to jack off.
Lurking mamma has plenty to say about Veronica’s fertility.
I was struck by the richness of Apulian folk wisdom about periods, ending with All you could do was abandon yourself to boredom and the thought of never-born babies.
A late bloomer, the last in her class. Her mother takes it as an affront that Veronica wants to see a gynecologist. We excavate ad infinitum the popular Italian roots of such cultural aversions and prohibitions.
Indeed, we have reached the height of paradox.
Veronica befriends the goth Francesca/Glenda (“The Beanstalk”) in town, whose mother happens to be a gynecologist. Her first visit reveals a cyst in her breast that requires surgery. I have to say, as a reader, this infuriated me. Children —of all ages —pay the balance due for their parents’ resistance and ignorance.
Veronica has an abortion. She laments that pregnancy tests are so hard to find and so expensive to buy in Italy compared to Germany, where they’re cheap and plentiful.
How is this possible? What good is the European Community? I laughed out loud.
Her long-term boyfriend gives her numerous treatises on parenthood.
The mamma continues to lurk in the background, incessantly texting, begging for a connection that she insists on controlling, and in the absence of her absolute control, doesn’t want. Always living it up, aren’t you, she texts Veronica after an abortion.
Gender politics in Italy are no picnic, but the non-consenting fetus graveyard (aka “the angel garden”) takes the cake.
Why do Italian novels always talk about family bonds? And mourning?
We write not to process grief, but to make it up. To invent it? in its absence? or to make up for it?
Veronica can’t tell time. The perfect metaphor.
An attempt to connect with a friend from high school devolves into an asymmetrical/symmetrical confession of grief: Veronica says her father died, but he hasn’t. The classmate offers that his mutt died.
His behaviour reveals that he was likely on the receiving end of her father’s shouting.
Chapter 21 (page 139)
Glenda’s mother, the gynecologist, becomes Veronica’s confidante and safe place for sex.
Is it possible that if you’re fucking without knowing that you’re fucking, then fucking is not, in fact, taking place?
This is how Veronica arrives at nineteen convinced that she is still a virgin. But Smilzi, Za says, we’ve already fucked.
Veronica and Za tell a couple of lies, take the keys to the country house, and head to Ascoli Piceno. Via an unopened letter she learns that her father has been having an affair with a younger coworker named Rosa. The house is unheated. The sheets are ice-cold. The sex is terrible. The weekend is a bust.
Rosa sends businesslike condolences when Veronica’s father dies.
How deep the gap between what we yearn for and what we receive.
End week 3.
Thanks for reading with Open Doors Review! Join us for a live discussion of Lost On Me on June 8.
Chapter 22 (page 146)
I continue to find meaning in the names of her only two identified boyfriends: Za and A. From Z to A.
Vero cheats on Za with a scion of the Bavarian upper middle class after he lights her coal stove. His wealth is tremendous. Cars, art, apartments.
Za finds out about the cheating after he travels to Germany to propose. Za’s rebound engagement happens three months later. He found God, and shortly after, a fiancee who also found God first.
Right person, wrong time. Wrong person, right time. Early adulthood is so stressful. There’s no way to tell if anything is working or not, good or bad. It’s the height of paradox.
Segue to professional careers besieged by sexism and its many proposals. Oh to be made a salaried parliamentary aide with zero work expectations in exchange for an unspecified amount of sex with an older man. Of course this continues today in a hundred ways, everywhere. (See earlier comments regarding social calculus.)
Vero, Cecilia and Milena move into the empty apartment of her deceased grandparents. Vero insists she doesn’t want to talk to Za. There is very little by way of personal hygiene or nutrition happening in that apartment. Eventually, and not long after, Vero’s aunt arrives to evict them all and return them to real life.
Vero learns that Za is once more engaged to be married, this time to a different woman. The last-ditch attempt happens, as it often does. Za confesses he’s dreamed about Vero. Vero dreams about him. But while he continues to animate her fantasies, she appears in his dreams as a nun.
Chapter 23 (page 155)
But would a nun swear this much? The narrative pendulum swings back.
Her family swears. A lot. Except for mamma.
“I will not call the janitor a dipshit.”
Still laughing. The transgressions of profane language pale in comparison to her showoff literacy as she writes out her punishment in printing and cursive.
Mamma returns to dispense divine judgment regarding Vero’s failure as a writer. Clearly, it’s the swearing. Real writers don’t swear so much. (Has this mom been around real writers?)
The Apulian mother freely declares terrone (hick) accents on the basis of public broadcast.
Her friend Cecilia’s father, a northern industrialist rearing daughters of regal bearing, won’t countenance foul language in his fine home. He is, however, happy to support violent resistance against fascists.
This tale of imaginary nonprofit work in Mexico makes my skin crawl. Vero and Cecilia are lucky that worse didn’t happen to them. I did, however, appreciate their resourcefulness in representing castoff knitwear as their original creations.
“…I fear the truth more than death.”
We’ve reached the height of paradox again. I was led to believe that this novel was confessional in nature.
It is occurring to me that Vero might be an unreliable witness to her own life. Ironic, given her nickname.
Chapter 24 (page 169)
Two siblings. Both writers, and both writing about their family. Vero doesn’t take it well.
Would you? I am very glad that neither of my brothers are writers. I have an aunt whose writing output gives me occasional pause for concern.
Not only are Vero and Chri siblings, they’re mutual co-contractors and work colleagues. Chri charges her a huge sum to write a piece for her: the review of a famous author’s galley proof of her new novel. The publication loves it but she never hears from them again.
She encounters the famous author floating through professional circles later. The famous author has no idea who she is or what she does for a living. (I don’t think this is so rare; publishing artists with a reading public must talk to dozens or hundreds of people a day, depending on where they are and what they’re doing.)
Still, when Vero tells Famous Writer that she’s Ursula Le Guin, I did a spit-take.
(Raimo has professionally translated Le Guin.)
Chapter 25 (page 175)
Has online life extinguished the epistolary friendship? What have we lost with relationships that are no longer cultivated via pen and paper, feeling-driven sentences and paragraphs that tarried in their arrival via snail mail?
Was Cecilia the better writer? Hard to know with that penmanship. A turn toward My Brilliant Friend. Vero lifts sentences of Cecilia’s here and there to put to her own use, without credit or citation. To impress a person.
Our unreliable narrator grows ever more unreliable.
Cecilia’s secondhand leather pants, purchased in Germany. Another example of the Absolute. The moment an ideal materializes, theoretically it ceases to exist. We are now in Kundera territory with the narrator and her asides.
Vero says that she and Cecilia experienced an inexplicable friendship rupture. But is it so inexplicable? Cecilia has taken the road more traveled, with marriage and children. How safe is it to keep a friend around who might dredge up fictionalized but recognizable versions of you to use in her fiction? Who wants to explain that to their kids?
Descriptions of the child-free zia Vero are heart-wrenching. Vero stops receiving invitations to the milestone events of friends with children. Her disappearance is complete. She has erased herself, in a way. Editing her life story.
Just one instance of warmth toward a child: at a party, the neglected child in Germany whom she ushers outside for a pee. Perhaps they bonded over the fact that no one cared that either of them were present. Or wanted to make them feel welcome. Or help them. I can picture that little girl’s megawatt smile and dirty cheeks now.
Twist the knife: Cecilia invites Vero to a new mamma meetup the day after her abortion. Vero says yes, then declines. Neither follows up.
How quickly and quietly this happens, when lives diverge, and how shocking it is to see it in retrospect. The swiftness. The carelessness. The inevitability. The grief.
Chapter 26 (page 185)
Vero is a chameleon. Her face changes in every shot when she is filmed. The pictures that A. takes of her are great pictures, but she feels that their grotesquely represented distortions are not her.
Mamma starts seeking and finding other authors about Vero’s age to befriend as surrogate daughters. The funhouse mirror replicates infinitely.
Where is Vero? Why is she so guarded, so protected? What does she fear? (Aside from being annoyed by her mamma.)
Mamma yearns for a daughter who cherishes her, who puts her on the pedestal of social media in the form of a flattering youthful picture.
So wide is the estrangement that Vero’s own mamma cannot recognize Vero’s face on a magazine cover. Does mamma even care what Vero looks like? Or does she just want the platonic form of the figlia in her life?
Why show up to be only a placeholder for a mamma? Why can’t the mamma see the figlia? What’s the point of putting the time into an inauthentic familial relationship, only to feel unseen at best, abused or misused at worst? What kind of time and self-representation do adult children owe to their parents?
The narrator throws up her hands, no longer firmly grasping her own fractured identity.
Oh, whatever. Let’s just say this is me.
Chapter 27 (page 192)
Cecilia and I grew apart.
Back to this loss, the ongoing estrangement from her best friend.
Did I betray her?
In order to write, must a writer be willing to die? How can a dead writer write? Or are we talking about the death of the author’s original/ongoing/working identity?
Is being a writer like taking piano lessons on a broken piano with a teacher so that you can be pretending how to pick out a tune?
How can one play a piano with missing keys?
One picks out a tune.
How can one explain oneself in a collage of exposition?
One omits certain key passages, or notes.
I am charmed by her descriptions of spending time in the company of Amory Blaine, the protagonist of This Side of Paradise. (Raimo has professionally translated Fitzgerald.)
I’m just full of the devil.
The veil grows thinner and thinner. Identity ever more unreliable. I begin to doubt who is reading this book.
The Irish bartender drops her when he learns that she has published two novels. He too chooses the road more travelled, and she spies him on social media a few years later, at a beach with a proverbial ageless two-year-old.
The difference between my imagination and reality wasn’t so clear … nothing … was true, and I was overcome with affection.
Vero wrote letters in the voice of Amory Blaine and sent them to herself?
The height of paradox.
Chapter 28 (page 201)
Chri’s novel about their family involves meticulous research and interviews, including one with Rosa, the former workplace lover of their deceased father.
Mamma sulks. Why do you always have to tell me lies?
Chri inserts Vero’s whole-cloth anecdote into his novel, failing to remember that she related it to him.
The height of paradox. How many heights are there in Paradox?
The sentimental person thinks things will last. The romantic person has a desperate confidence they won’t. – Amory Blaine
Rosa reluctantly parries on the tape, A story is an ambiguous concept. This statement can only be made by someone who attended an Italian high school. The sheer expertise and gentle handling of rhetoric. Impressive.
Memory is like a game of dice. Is the game pointless, or rigged?
The question of a nihilist.
Chapter 29 (page 210)
The truth might exist only in reticence.
But what about the writers? Come on, Vero – give us a reason to continue. Shouldn’t we try?
Vero used books as a shield, dodging the most fragile, tender, and comical parts of herself.
The confessional is, in fact, a dodge. The author is smarter than the reader. Or is she?
A story is an ambiguous concept.
We end on a tale to nowhere, a fragment related by Vero to nonno Peppino:
Once there was a stalk of wheat that grew in the woods.
“How’d that happen?” my grandpa asked.
I have no idea.
The story ended there. My grandpa was fine with that. So was I.
We’ve reached the height of paradox.
End week 4.
Thanks for reading with Open Doors Review! Join us for a live discussion of Lost On Me on June 8.
