Don’t ask me how you were born

Cairo Publishing

Don’t ask me how you were born

This story begins one winter morning at the sea. Gioia went out early for a run and is on a sun bed on a French beach when everything happens. A fire in her belly and she finds herself in a foreign hospital where she finds out she has lost a baby that she didn’t know she was expecting. From that moment, nothing will be as before. A freelance cultural reporter for an important Italian newspaper, Gioia Lieve realizes that she desires maternity and wants to have daughter with her long-time boyfriend, Uto. However, this sudden realization will have to come up against an ineluctable fact: to become parents, Gioia and Uto can hope for a miracle or turn to science. While, step after step, in growing loneliness, the protagonist faces the difficult course of assisted fecundation, she looks for reference points in the men of her life. From Uto, the utopia of perfect love, to Luca, a friend and occasional lover, to her boss Eros who distracts her with assignments of urgent articles. And on to Alberto, her new, grand future. In the background, the luminous presence of Andrea, gynaecologist putative father free scientist. Her twin Scilla and best friend, Clizia, with whom words are not needed and who follow her from afar as she gets over the pain of the abortion, faces the medical therapy for infertility and her body becomes a stranger to her. Life must go on: meetings, interviews, the editorial world – Milan and the rest of the world, from Turin to Mantua to New York –, and her passion for books, writers and writing that save her, luxury temporary worker in a society of liquid relations and sentiments. Non chiedermi come sei nata is a grand little story in today’s Italy. The difficulty of finding one’s way professionally and in private life. Turn-ups of the heart. Cruel twists of fate. The power of love. The search for happiness. An exposure of a country with a law that prevents women from being mothers.

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