Your Little Matter
As seen:
By Maria Grazia Calandrone, and and, Antonella Lettieri
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1 review
""Extraordinary."" The Guardian
Rome 1965. A man and a woman, excluded from Italian society, abandon their eight month old daughter in the Villa Borghese and take extreme action. In 2021, that child, author Maria Grazia Calandrone, sets out to discover the truth of what happened, examining the places where her mother lived and suffered.
Your Little Matter is an intimate reconstruction of the life and death of a parent, a shocking insight into the real lives of marginalised women from the Italian South in the relatively recent past, and the revelation of a cause celebre that was a catalyst for social change in Italy. Combining poetic and philosophical insight with forensic investigation, the completely personal with the very public, the book tells a devastating story of how the institutionalised callousness of state and society can lead to tragedy, and how the dogged pursuit of personal choice can lead to liberation.
Your Little Matter was shortlisted for the 2023 Premio Strega.
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An interesting book that's beautifully and poetically written and is as forensic in parts as it is imaginative in others. It tells the story of the author's mother's short and unhappy life and how and why she came to abandon the author as a baby. In so doing she tells of life for poor southern Italian women in the 1950's and '60's and the huge discriminations and oppression they suffered in a very patriarchal society. It's an intriguing and incredibly sad story with rigorous research blended easily with fictionalised sections.
