Tell me about yourself: Chiara Gamberale talks about the anxiety of growing up
Tell me about yourself, Chiara asks the people who were, in one way or another, part of her past, and were important in the younger phase of her life. People lost along the way but never forgotten, searched for and found via social media. With what objective? Reconnecting the threads of the past (perhaps), questioning old friends, first crushes and simple acquaintances about who they have become, years later, and above all understanding whether they too have stumbled and found obstacles on the path that leads to maturity. It is the context around which it revolves Tell me about yourselfthe latest work by the writer and author Chiara Gamberale, published by Einaudi.
Gamberale’s is an atypical and introspective novel, which talks about needs and duties: the need to live life in one’s own way, why not with a bit of cynicism, not caring about social conventions; the duties, however, towards Bambina, the six-year-old daughter, had “in adolescent circumstances”, despite Chiara being in her forties. It is also from here that her uncertainties come, her fear of having the wrong approach to life, to the point of defining herself as a “rotten child”, a woman who grew up but matured late, in the wrong way. And so getting in touch with the people who populated his past, understanding their evolution and discovering if they too had to walk along a bumpy life path, has a power with redemptive nuances.
Chiara, the protagonist, digs inside herself by digging into the lives of others. She does it with a certain rigor, because only in this way can she truly make peace with the person she has become over the last twenty years: it is the chance meeting with a friend she hadn’t seen since high school that gave her the idea of contacting people again that he mythologized when he was a teenager. To achieve this goal she is willing to travel to Iceland, leaving her little daughter with her father.
Recorder on the table, like a journalist, interviews Raffaello, Ivan, Riccarda, Stefano, those he defines as his “north stars”. Questions about his life are not allowed, these are the agreements, because to “transform the swamp into the open sea” he must rely exclusively on the stories of others, without admixtures, to be able, through comparison, to find a balance between his condition of eternal teenager hungry for emotions and that of a woman and mother with responsibility. Without distorting oneself and losing the essence of one’s deepest identity.
In just over two hundred pages that flow easily, Chiara Gamberale mixes feelings and emotions, she is not afraid to lay bare a part of herself, express fears and hopes. It frames his lack of emotional stability, which is the same as that of at least two generations of people, hovering between thirty and forty years old, trapped in unawareness, often incapable of finding a balance between dreams (perhaps broken) and what you have become.