Perhaps one cannot heal from the insecurities and fragility from which we are affected, but can be told. And teacher in doing it is Peter Cameron, The American novelist author of a cult book written twenty years ago, “one day this pain will be useful to you”, precious starting from the highly suggestive ovidian title. And to the suggestions of the titles, Cameron keeps us very much, as is evident from “What people do all day” (Adelphi), stories with a suspended and sometimes stranged atmosphere of which He spoke to Taormina for Taobuk 2025, in dialogue with the journalist Luca Mastrantonio and welcomed by a very large audience of adults and young people.
The family can be the safest place in the world but also the most terrible, in which the insecurities often remain crouched and then explode. And so to the young James of “One day this pain will be useful to you” and to its difficulty of crossing that slippery ford that is the early youth in a “strange” family, up to understanding, finding comfort in books and nature, which it is unavoidable to cross the pain to grow, the characters of this book, some unsolved, other doubts, and still fragile, united by solitude, happen. “Loneliness has always interested me, but one thing is loneliness, it is more to feel alone in the midst of others, even if- the author- when you feel alone in childhood, a great strength of imagination develops”.
And urged by Mastrantonio still speaks of the role of social media, a good and a problem for the reasons we know, of the difficulty today to remain on a direct level of communication, but also of the positive side of writing by chatting knowing that you do not have a concrete person in front of you. To conclude with a nod disconsolate to his America who does not understand for having been able to re -elected his current president. And then Cameron urges to cultivate empathy towards others, towards nature, towards animals but above all towards art, towards books and music.