A tale, an investigation, and a small treasure chest of ideas to draw the missing piece of women's empowerment and to carp the secret of the couples that exist to allow both to expand. A revolutionary book to give ourselves the true privilege: to give ourselves the opportunity to redesign existence and our own dreams.

"Mental load is the big pink elephant in our rooms. Annalisa has the courage to ride it on an uncomfortable but necessary journey capable of saving us and our marriages." - Claudia De Lillo

"A book that weighs what we women carry in and on us day after day after day. And in the meantime it caresses us." - Chiara Gamberale

It happens suddenly, almost by accident. The exceptionality of a new routine, dictated by the pandemic, sheds light on a truth that Annalisa Monfreda had long kept silent about. The author watches the lives of her husband and daughters readjust to a new balance, while her own is consumed within the machine that makes it possible. It is hard to accept that she, who for years as a journalist has been investigating the most subtle obstacles that prevent women from desiring freely, she, who married a feminist man and together with him is raising two daughters in the cult of freedom, she, herself, is succumbing to the most obvious of inequalities, the one that silently takes place inside the home: the imbalance of mental load. On her, as a woman, falls the responsibility for organizing everything that revolves around home, husband, children and family members. Her brain has an always open file, and not because she forgot to close it, but because she consults it continuously, countless times a day. From that moment begins for the author a poetic and scientific investigation along the roots of that disparity. For an entire year, by day she meets writers and scientists, housewives and businesswomen; she analyzes numbers and research; she immerses herself in the pages of literature, in essays of history, in the fundamentals of sociology. And then in the evening, she sits at the dinner table, which becomes the scene of small, revolutionary conversations, during which the whole family together establishes a new language with which to speak. A new covenant around which to ground themselves. A new stepping stone.