Journalist Mariapia Bonanate offers us a searing testimony to life alongside her husband, who lives with locked-in syndrome—a condition that leaves him completely paralyzed yet fully conscious of the world around him. He knows she sits beside his bed in that room. And she tells us everything: about them, about the new way they look at each other, about their transformed daily life, about their new reality framed by that window overlooking the plaza—so utterly different from what came before.
Drawing on passages from the diary of Etty Hillesum, her spiritual companion, Bonanate wrestles with faith itself and with the cruelty of the prison where her husband now lives. Just as Hillesum made sense of her own tragic fate, Bonanate comes to understand why, after her husband's accident, she felt so utterly abandoned by God. This is a deeply personal account—too complex to summarize in a few lines—and it will leave you thinking hard about suffering and about the courage it takes simply to go on living.
Matteo Cinti, 2012