Forbidden Notebook

Forbidden Notebook could also be read as a book of encouragement: encouragement to dig deeply, in the Ferrantian sense, into one’s self and one’s relations with other people. It’s not an easy process—starting with finding the time and the space, the privacy to do it—and Valeria is constantly vowing to stop: to stop writing and get rid of the diary,

I took advantage of the moment to tell him that yesterday Mirella insisted on asking for a new coat: she claimed that if we want to, we can afford it, because both her father and I received a bonus for Christmas. In vain I tried to make her understand that the money is already promised to other expenses—maybe she thinks we want to keep it for ourse

If I hadn’t written it, I would have forgotten about it. We’re always inclined to forget what we’ve said or done in the past, partly in order not to have the tremendous obligation to remain faithful to it. Otherwise, it seems to me, we would all discover that we’re full of mistakes and, above all, contradictions, between what we intended to do and

ever since I happened to start keeping a diary, I seem to have discovered that a word or an intonation can be just as important, or even more, than the facts we’re accustomed to consider important.

It’s terrible for a mother to ask herself that question about her own daughter, a girl of twenty. But I couldn’t talk to anyone about it; Riccardo and Michele would react violently. Men always say, “You’ll be sorry if my daughter, you’ll be sorry if my sister …” They say, “I won’t tolerate it.” It’s easy to say “I won’t tolerate it.” Yet things hap

Mirella responded energetically that if she studies so much, it’s because she wants to start work, to be independent, and to leave home as soon as she’s of age: then she’ll be able to keep all her drawers locked without anyone being offended. She added that she keeps her diary in the drawer, so she locks it, and, besides, Riccardo does the same thi

I would have liked to promise Riccardo that I’d buy him a tuxedo on the installment plan, as we’d bought Mirella’s dress, but a man’s suit is more expensive, and then a man doesn’t have to find a husband. So I had to acknowledge that I couldn’t burden our budget with this superfluous expense. I remembered when Mirella and Riccardo were small childr

If I sometimes say “I don’t feel well,” Michele and the children fall into a brief, respectful, awkward silence. Then I get up, return to doing what I must. No one makes a move to help me, but Michele cries, “Look, you say you don’t feel well and you’re not still for a moment.”

I often complain that I have too many things to do, that I’m the family servant, the household slave—that I never have a moment to read a book, for example. That’s all true, but in a certain sense that servitude has also become my strength, the halo of my martyrdom. So on those rare occasions when I happen to take a nap for half an hour before Mich