Foreign rights: Valeria Zito (valeria.zito@einaudi.it)
“Dangerous, sad, doleful situations thrilled me as though only drama could reveal life as it truly is: naked, intact, soul-stirring”.
For the first time, one of Italy’s best-loved authors bares her soul in a book that is overwhelmingly sincere. By recounting her novel-obsessed adolescence, she talks about the contradictions of life, in which everything can both save us and ruin us, from our mother to an evocative novel. And she writes a paean to encounters, because, basically, this is what we are feverishly searching for in the pages of a novel, in a poem, or in a movie that strikes a chord in us: the discovery that other people are just like us.
A girl who is attracted by the abyss spends her days at home, reading and savoring the obscure pleasure of suffering: this is a portrait of the artist as a youngster. Starting with her literary passions that, right from her childhood, left a mark on her, Daria Bignardi, with her intelligent and profound yet light-handed writing style, reveals her intimate and shameless side – from adolescent lies to lost loves, all the way to recurring melancholy moods – and narrates how humanity as a whole cannot avoid pain, as well as the wonder that can be hiding behind each and every single thing, even behind fear. An autobiographical confession, an educational memoir, a handbook of beauty, this book is free of all labels and, above all, is an act of love for and faith in the power of the word. It is a pathway made of questions, illuminations, memories, that goad and soothe, that can move readers and make them smile; a journey in which life shows itself to be “furiously big”.
An incandescent book, written in a state of grace. Daria Bignardi searches inside herself, and inside all of us, with the honesty and stylistic measure that have gained her a broad audience of readers, both male and female.
Daria Bignardi
Writer, journalist and television presenter, Daria Bignardi was born in Ferrara and has lived in Milan for many years. In 2009 she published the memoir Non vi lascerò orfani (Mondadori), which won the Rapallo Prize, the Elsa Morante Prize and the City of Padua Prize. Mondadori has also published her novels Un karma pesante (2010), L’acustica perfetta (2012), L’amore che ti meriti (2014), Santa degli impossibili (2015), Storia della mia ansia (2018), Oggi faccio azzurro (2020) and Libri che mi hanno rovinato la vita (2022). Her books have been translated into many languages.
From 2002 to 2004 she edited the monthly magazine Donna and in 2016 she took over as director of Rai 3 for over a year. During her television career she has written and directed highly successful and award-winning programmes such as Tempi Moderni on Italia Uno, Le Invasioni Barbariche on La7 and L’Assedio on Nove. A contributor to many newspapers, she hosted the book programme La mezz’ora Daria on Radio Deejay for fifteen years and returned to radio with L’ora Daria on Radio Capital; she has been one of the leading writers for Vanity Fair since it first came out.
In the academic field, after teaching Storytelling for a year at the Alma Mater University of Literature in Bologna, she was a speaker at the graduation ceremony of the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice in Piazza San Marco. In 2018 she made her theatre debut in Bologna with the cycle of staged readings La coscienza dell’ansia, replicated in theatres such as Carignano in Turin and San Barnaba in Brescia.
– Libri che mi hanno rovinato la vita (Books that Ruined my Life)
Foreign publishers of Daria Bignardi’s works
Albania: Botimet Dudaj
Brazil: Bertrand Brasil
France: Les Escales
Germany: Insel; List
Iran: Qoqnoos
The Netherlands: Cargo
Poland: Esteri
Russia: Corpus
Slovenia: Zalorba
Spain and Latin America: Duomo Ediciones; Edhasa
Turkey: Kirmizi kedi