WONDY AWARD 2024

It's never the right time to have a baby. First we want to live, travel, work. Antonella wants to become a writer: hers is an absolute ambition, without escape. That's why when she was in her twenties she voluntarily had two abortions. But then when years later, with a partner by her side, she feels ready, her body is not. And so begins the brutal process of IVF, made of actual tortures, unconfessed aspirations, ephemeral and swaggering happiness, suffering and anger. One would think that this is a story like many others, but there is nothing that goes according to plan here: this is a story told from the inside of an avalanche, with the ability to look at oneself and not believe it, and to challenge, condemn, smile at oneself for courage. In a crescendo of unspeakable narrative power, Antonella Lattanzi describes what happened to her body, to her life, confessing the inexorable force of a desire that stops at nothing, but also the guilt, the insensitivity of some doctors, the friendship that can sustain the most atrocious silences and confidences, the relationship of a couple always on the verge of shattering, the fierce rage towards the world (and pregnant women). She keeps the reader close beside her, glued to the page, just as it happens with the editing of a movie, creating a thriller-like suspense. The mind-blowing thing is that while telling an exceptional, and crude story, this novel actually manages to speak truthfully, and in a profoundly relevant way, about all women — mothers and non-mothers alike — who at different point in their lives might have wondered: do I want a child? what is the right time? will I have to give up myself, my ambitions? and why does everyone get pregnant and I don't?

«I have a dam in my mind where all the things that hurt too much are hidden. I don't want to tell anyone those things. I don't want to think those things. I want them never to have existed. And if I don't say them, they don't exist».