"Malamore is a 2008 book, and it has a strength that grows over the years: it grows because the real question that animates it remains intact over time. And the question is not why men so often feel entitled to exercise violence - verbal, physical, psychological - on the women they claim to love. The real question - it seems to me, rather - is why women are unable to reject violence when they recognize it. What induces them, what induces us, to endure the crescendo of humiliation, the petty domestic harassment, the public bullying that always preludes a tragic denouement? What makes us believe we can change, accommodate, tame the threat? There is a kind of conceit, says the ancient fable that opens this book: the little mouse falls in love with the cat, convinced that she will make him a vegetarian. There is a deep dark feeling that feeds on guilt, tell the many stories of women--famous, anonymous--who like shooting stars illuminate the crime scene. Exercises in resisting pain, the subtitle reads. Perhaps the key is here: in the confidence women have with pain, the gymnasium that serves to transform it into strength. Each will find her own answer as she reads. She will find something of her own story and perhaps the courage to look it in the eye. If it happens even once, it is for that time that I wrote this book." Concita De Gregorio