Brave. This is a brave book. *Amore caro* is brave because in a world where almost nothing shocks us anymore—violence, waste, money, death broadcast live for spectacle, sexuality exploited for profit—a few dark corners remain. Corners we still, with profoundly twisted logic, feel ashamed of. We look away when they pass us, when they ask for our time, our attention, our care. Physical disability and especially mental disability are glaring examples.
So it takes courage for famous people—television and film personalities, journalists, writers, musicians, politicians—to tell the story of their domestic lives alongside handicap. Through essays of varying tone and sensibility, the contributors describe what it means to be a parent, sibling, in-law, or child to someone "fragile" (as the subtitle frames it). "By opening that closet," Sereni writes in her introduction, "they have made a confession that was never easy." Because "this too is an outing." Her hope—her "strong hope"—is that readers trapped in "silent, powerless isolation" will find the strength to break free by reading these testimonies from recognizable faces. But something else happens. As we listen to their words—brave, humble, respectful, uncertain, arrogant, proud, joyful, optimistic, anxious, profound—we see a different person from the one we're used to seeing. The famous actress. The prominent journalist. The magazine editor. The politician. The musician. Suddenly they look nothing like the image we've stored away. The double thread of the title binds narrator and reader alike, unsettling us both. By the time you finish, you're pleasantly disoriented. You no longer know quite who, among all these voices—the ones speaking and the ones being spoken about—are truly the fragile ones. The ball of yarn on the cover becomes, in the end, a real thread of Ariadne, guiding us through the labyrinth.
Giulia Galeotti, 2009