Donatella Di Pietrantonio writes a novel about community silence after a crime.

The COVID pandemic begins, and Amanda returns to her mother's house in a village in Abruzzo. She has changed, and the excitement she had when she went to study in Milan has vanished. She barely speaks, and her mother, Lucia, suffers.

“Leaving or returning from a small provincial town is one of the themes that many people who live in the interior ask themselves at some point,” says Donatella Di Pietrantonio (Arsita, Italy, 1962) about the beginning of The Fragile Age (Duomo/Edicions 62, Strega Prize 2024), adding that “most people want to leave, but some don’t integrate into the big city and, like Amanda, return to look for the answers within it.” The writer doesn’t have the solution, because “the revolutionary action of literature is, precisely, to find the questions, even the most uncomfortable ones.”

Amanda's return allows the narrator to "unearth the past that no one wanted to name, the silence that an entire community had maintained regarding an event considered inconceivable and that happened on that mountain: a double femicide, and a survivor." This collective trauma in an idyllic setting—a real event that took place in 1997 in the author's region—"showed not only that this place of ours was not safe, but that there is no place in the world that is truly safe for women."

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Another central theme is the intergenerational relationship between the grandfather, the mother, and the daughter: “I was interested in showing how this small community of farmers, of shepherds, goes from an almost primitive, almost ancestral condition to modernity in three generations. She tries to disguise and hide her rural origins, starting with the dialect, to the world beyond her very closed, very small valley, which is so close to her. It's also my story, naturally. She wants to free herself from that very rural world, but she remains trapped between her father and her daughter, as happens to so many middle-aged women, but when a body receives so many tensions from opposite directions, it can break.”

In the fiction, the crime takes place at a campsite whose land ends up being owned by Lucia: "This land represents that trauma, which was personal, family-oriented, and shared by the entire community, but hasn't been digested. Because the community hasn't verbalized that past, the campsite deteriorates and is vandalized, and ultimately it will be the third generation—Amanda's, the least involved—who will have to decide its future, since neither her grandfather nor her mother get to decide on a future of change and transformation."

In another plot twist, the land becomes the object of covetousness for a hotel group, but what it achieves is precisely to mobilize the locals: “Italy, and my region in particular, is experiencing this intense conflict between opening up to tourism, which quickly becomes massive, or trying to protect a territory that is fragile, like the human characters in the novel. The fact that this ending has been left open is symptomatic and revealing that we haven't found a solution and are oscillating between two poles: staying hidden in these precious places that no one but us knows and protecting the territory, or opening up to this tourism that could bring wealth, but what it will do is expose the territory to grave dangers.” “We want slow, quality tourism that respects places and the environment, but it's a truly difficult balance to achieve,” the writer insists.

Di Pietrantonio portrays an insecure mother, with a strong sense of guilt “that has a superficial cause and a hidden one,” she assures: “The superficial part could have to do with the fact that on the day of the crime, she had gone to the seaside and didn’t invite her friend Doralice, who suffered the trauma even though she survived, but Lucia didn’t do it on purpose, so even if she feels guilt, it’s not justified. But what, on the other hand, is the deep sense of guilt she has? Well, she was ashamed of Doralice because she speaks in dialect, can’t swim, is clumsy, and she wants to shake off the label of being a village girl, daughter of peasants.” The writer, in fact, recalls that "the political unification of Italy has not corresponded to a real unification, although Italian as a national language makes it seem so. Beneath this lie the dialects, which are numerous, and often very distinct, and this has consequences, because those of us born in the interior were expected to have linguistic competence in Italian, but at home, with our families, in the villages, we spoke only the dialect, because our parents, due to their low level of schooling, didn't speak Italian. So for me, as for Lucia or Doralice in the novel, the mother tongue, the one spoken in the family, was a language of shame, even though I am completely bilingual and have maintained a strong bond with my place of origin." “Today,” the author continues, “in Italy, some dialects enjoy a high literary dignity, with a written form and a literature, but other dialects do not, because they are spoken by a few thousand people and are very localized, with no exchange with the outside world. Furthermore, and in parallel, in proportion to the loss of population in the interior, dialects are disappearing.”