The book's frank title comes from an engaging duet that Damiano and Margherita Tercon performed on a television talent show. Reading it, we discover what lies behind it—both the distant history and the immediate reasons.
In My Sister Drives Me Crazy (Mondadori, 2020), the duet explores with sharp irony what it means to live as Damiano—a classical singer—with Asperger's syndrome, one of many forms autism can take. His sister Margherita plays the role of foil with considerable skill. The book emerged from the success of that television performance, but its real purpose—far more interesting than the show itself—is to reveal how the performance came to be. Margherita and Damiano's voices alternate throughout, tracing their school years and beyond, letting us see both their struggles and their strengths. It would have been easy to get lost in a story marked by Asperger's syndrome (diagnosed in Damiano only after he turned twenty), serious bullying, and the eating disorders Margherita has never stopped fighting. But as they write, "things don't always have to end badly, even if sometimes it seems like the only possibility"—what matters instead is "how we react to the world and to what happens to us." That difference shines through in their ability to tell with remarkable "lightness" what is anything but light. Damiano's natural wit and exaggerated descriptions—his impressive vocabulary would surely have earned him far more recognition from the various teachers he describes, as his homework tutor points out—manage to raise smiles even when recounting genuinely difficult moments in his life, both at school and beyond. Margherita turns her gaze inward and tells her own stumbles with a light but knowing hand. Her fragility emerges as she grows, as it does in so many similar cases, yet her relationship with her brother—frank and equal—seems to give her the key to escape a difficult spiral.
Each carries their own burden up the mountain ahead of them. Yet each at their own pace, they fully enjoy the other's presence, accepting their different rhythms, pausing now and then to look into each other's eyes and find the strength to move forward through hard passages. What's striking, too, is that the parents' voices never feel distant. Solid and present, they remain in the background of a story that belongs to Damiano and Margherita. If the television audience's applause was well-deserved, the reader's will be even more so—those who recognize in this brother and sister that vital, shared, and resilient difference.
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