“This book is the true story of Daria and me,” he warns Ada D’Adamo (Ortona, 1967-Rome, 2023). Although names have been changed, “the words remain authentic.” The Italian author does not deceive, from the beginning she warns that she is It is not a fiction; There is honesty in that warning and a veiled desire to escape autofiction. Como de aire is not a novel about a self that can be identified with the author and where the erasure between what is real and what is fictional is played, it is a testimonial text.
Without leaving aside the autobiographical element, D’Adamo approaches the terrain of the essay in such a way that the book is not only the narration of a Vital experience, but above all a reflection on this and its connotations. Hence it can be defined as a work about illness, the body, motherhood –his desire and his rejection– and the disability, which he faces based on personal experience, but without limiting himself to it: he not only endorses the idea that the intimate is political, but rather it assumes that there is no personal experience that is not crossed by the collective one.
Disabled by powers
“Like all mothers, I would like others to appreciate you, to love you the way I love you. So I try to make people fall in love with you by telling them about your exploits. Sometimes I succeed. Not always. That’s why when I see rejection in the eyes of those who should take care of you, the drink is more bitter,” writes D’Adamo, the mother of Ada, that girl who, due to a medical error, was condemned to suffer a total disability.
Not only does it endorse the idea that the intimate is political, but it also assumes that there is no personal experience that is not crossed by the collective.
No one saw the malformation of his brain: he was born “with a hundred percent disability.” And, with her, a new D’Adamo was born. “When you have a disabled child you walk for him, you see for him, you take the elevator because he can’t go up the stairs, you go by car because he can’t get on the bus […]. And little by little, for others, you also end up being somewhat disabled: “a disabled person by proxy”, we read at the beginning, where the memory of darkness by lack of information, loneliness and misunderstanding are intertwined with the fear of the cancer that makes her unable to care for Daria.. It is the fault of someone who has always cared and can no longer, and it is a mother’s fear of her possible absence.
‘Inclusion’ is a hypocritical term
“Ours is a society that has simply eliminated the concept of illness, in which the sick are always the others”, reflect. Not only Daria, now she is also among these “others” whom society separates, in its “umpteenth need to contrast the identity of the strong with that of the weak.” From this otherness, she reflects on the place of the disease in society and the hypocrisy hidden in the term ‘inclusion’: the teacher who does not want to give water to Daria for fear that she will drown is the first gesture that keeps her away from school. in Italy, a country that “has exemplary legislation on school inclusion.”
He knows well that “between the law and its effective application there are trenches behind which an army of bellicose mothers fights a daily battle.” Because they are the mothers of those children that he sees in hospitals and clinics. What would have happened to them if their mothers had known what they would suffer? She couldn’t choose, because she didn’t know about the malformation, but if she had known, what would she have done? In full debate on abortion, intervenes with a letter sent to La Repubblica in 2008: “Let the Church, politics and medicine stop looking at women as whores who can’t wait to kill their children. Abortion is a decision painful for those who must make it, but it is a decision that must be guaranteed.
She died without knowing that she would win the Strega Prize for her book, which, in its final pages, becomes a farewell letter to Daria, that daughter who, against the odds, survived her.
The author died without knowing that she would win the Strega Prize for her book, which, in its final pages, becomes a kind of farewell letter for Daria, that daughter who, against the odds, survived her. ‘Eat of air’ is a story marked by pain, but also by immeasurable love. D’Adamo does not hide, but rather makes explicit contradictions, fears, guilt and reproaches. It is a book about a sick body, the individual and the social; about loneliness and helplessness, about being invisible among the healthy. Like Annie Ernaux, she manages to go beyond her experience to put words about what is not named: illness, abortion, disability, death. Therein lies the value of it.
‘Like air’
Author: Ada D’Adamo
Translation: Celia Filipetto Isicato
Editorial: Lumen
160 pages. 17.90 euros
