What I Know About You

When Nadia Terranova finds herself in front of her new-born daughter, a profound realisation strikes her: she can no longer afford to go out of her mind. It is not a thought unrelated to her experience, but something that happened to her great-grandmother Venera, who was hospitalised for a time at the Lorenzo Mandalari psychiatric hospital in Messina, following a bout of depression caused by the loss of her third daughter during pregnancy. These thoughts lead her to delve into her family’s past, into a mythology made up of stories that are handed down and that recount a narrative that ultimately becomes commonly accepted but that is actually full of unreliable details. Quello che so di te is a poignant and intimate novel, a work of autofiction in which the author confronts memory and the delicate boundary between reality and imagination. Digging into the Mandalari archives, she pieces together the fragments of Venera’s life, creating a continuous dialogue between past and present, where historical records, recollections, and inherited narratives all intertwine.

Quello che so di te
Nadia Terranova
Guanda, 2025