Kathleen ’s Reviews > One Italian Summer > Status Update

“History, memory is by definition fiction. Once an event is no longer present, but remembered, it is a narrative. And we can choose the narratives we tell- about our own lives, our own stories, our own relationships. We can choose the chapters we give meaning.”

When you’re just a reflection, what happens when the image vanishes?

‘“What do you like?” he asks me. It’s such a simple question. Unordinary. But I find myself unable to answer it. I am so used to the pleasure of habit… Is familiarity a taste? Or just an accustomed tolerance.’

“It would be a shame if you kept doing something only because you’ve done it before.”

“The problem is that we hasn’t really been through everything together, because we hadn’t been through anything before. Not until now. Our life had unfolded with the ease of an open road… We were the same people who had met at twenty-two years old.”

I began to ask myself if this was the marriage I wanted to die in, if this was the marriage I wanted to see me through this, my mother’s illness, and what would, impossibly, remain after.