RICORDATEMI COME VI PARE

The living voice of the most lucid and passionate intellectual of our time returns to visit us for a formidable showdown on power, feminism, faith, literature. But above all on the ten lives she lived with enchanted impudence, without fear, retraced orally in the only organic autobiography possible for someone who crossed the world running barefoot, burning brightly through each stage. On the eve of a death that saw her joyful as a martyr capable of singing as she advanced toward the lions, Michela Murgia spent a week telling her story to Beppe Cottafavi, her editor and friend. The recordings of that last summer of hers, still full of stories as the previous fifty had been, give substance to this extraordinary book, enriched by four splendid rediscovered stories and other lost texts that the author has chosen and indicated between one memory and another. From a similar pond teeming with life, like the one on whose shores she grew up, an archipelago of intimate details emerges: queer loves and relationships, Oristano matriarchs who recite five-colored rosaries to save every continent, Madonnas with wigs, violent men and dreamy teachers, lessons in the Sardinian language and Korean culture, in biblical exegesis and magical writing, in active politics and cultural militancy. Frank and visionary, anti-fascist and immune to compromise, Murgia reveals to us how a provincial girl, trained to read the Gospel and be content with surviving, got it into her head to change the world instead, relying on an irreducible aspiration to happiness.