The Chiara of «A thin waist»debut novel by Chiara GamberaleRoman writer and presenter and author of television and radio programs, has become a woman, a well-known writer, and is the single mother of Bambina, born from a pregnancy that was not in her plans nor in the plans of the little girl’s father from whom she lives separately. Chiara is the narrator of «Tell me about you» (Einaudi), the beautiful novel in which Gamberale delves further into the tunnel of searching for the meaning of love as if into something disturbing, yet necessary to grow and accept oneself.
And so, «after having spent at least thirty years contesting the family structure», Chiara at forty years old welcomes the help of her parents and goes to live in the “Quartiere Triste” in Rome, a “good” neighborhood of people” normal.” After an adolescence spent in Garbatella, as a student at Socrate high school, years broken up by anxieties, exhilarating emotions and unhappiness, shared with her best friend Grazia, now, for Chiara, finding herself in that quiet neighborhood where everyday life is dedicated to unconditional care of his daughter, it seems like a colorless life. She would like an alignment of thoughts and feelings like she dreamed of as a girl and, although she managed to have a daughter in adolescent circumstances, although she knows that we are all defective in love, she has not yet learned what a couple is, nor how it works.
Who knows, perhaps we need to raise our heads from trifles, as her father repeats, and land in reality, or rather in “current affairs”, but really, Chiara asks herself, growing up, becoming adults, is finding yourself in a swamp in which the only ” certainty” is the compulsion to repeat gestures and habits? Or, on the contrary, should we accept change, have the courage to choose by facing doubts, mistakes, fears, hopes and going beyond the “fictional” that is in every beginning and end of our experiences?
One day Chiara meets by chance, in the “Sad neighborhood”, Raffaello, a former high school classmate married to Giovanna and with two children. So she begins her investigation by contacting and meeting those who were the myths of her years as a girl in the midst of the hurricane of transformations: what have become of the rebel, the ambiguous, the anarchist, the most beautiful of all, the representative of institute, the nice guy with whom she was silently in love but to whom she was only a dear friend? “They march in a swamp”? Are they “someone else’s vomit basin” or have they lived up to their dreams? Where have they put the anger, the obsessions, the madness of their young days?
With her intimate writing, the family always under her observation lens, telling between past and present who stumbles, who gets confused, who gets lost but also who re-emerges, Gamberale makes everything in which any of us can find ourselves echo : the mysteries of relationships, the traps of adolescence, the secrets beyond appearances, the excesses, the carousel of love, the confusion of bodies.
Maybe we shouldn’t expect things to be resolved, they may not be resolved at all, but we can start again, or rather start over.
