From Castellitto to Castellitto. It’s Maria’s turn, novelist

Actor father, writer mother, handyman brother: it’s just my family, the twenty-five-year-old Maria tells Il Foglio, in her novel debut with “Menodrama”

Annie Ernaux, who last year won the Nobel Prize for literature, at the age of twenty-two had promised herself: if I am not able to write a novel at twenty-five, I will commit suicide. Maria Castellitto, born in 1997, sits down to talk about her book in a bad tourist bar a stone’s throw from Piazza di Spagna, near where the romantic poet died John Keats when he was twenty-five. The protagonist of Castellitto’s book, Menodrama, just out for Marsilio, scuderia Clare Valerioflirts with self-destruction and guilt. Duna wants to write a novel, but can’t, and thinks of an early end. “I understand that you can’t think about suicide when you have the opportunity to drink champagne in your life. How ungrateful I am,” says Duna, who lives in London and works in a production house where she was placed by her famous director father. On the cover is a bridge, and bridges in novels usually jump off. The novel revolves around suicide, but unlike Werther or Jacopo Ortis, there is an expansion of the individual’s subjectivity. Duna travels around London, in her world there are successful singers and friends locked up in a psychiatric clinic, colleagues in love with her and ghosts of Roman adolescence, and many strangers who walk the same streets every day, ready for the most extreme gestures. Duna bounces between the moods of others like a ball in a pinball machine, confused, privileged and hyper-aware of everything.