The protagonist of the new episode of "Stories", the series of interviews with the main protagonists of culture and entertainment on Sky TG24, is Chiara Gamberale. Guest of deputy director Omar Schillaci, the writer talks about herself in “Chiara Gamberale – Io Bambina”. Airing Monday 28 September at 9pm on Sky TG24, Saturday 3 October at 12.30pm on Sky Arte and always available on demand.
'Liberi Tutti', the seventeenth novel
At the center of the interview is 'Liberi Tutti' published by Feltrinelli, Gamberale's seventeenth novel, in bookstores from 22 September. "Something huge happened in a first grade school: five families, five couples and even the children are under investigation. A voice, that of the teacher, tells the police everything and enters the homes of these five family systems", explains the author, who for the first time tackles a genre novel: "For the first, perhaps second time in my life, it is a sentimental thriller. I am as excited as a debut, despite it being my seventeenth novel". The spark, she says, came from a habit that has always accompanied her: "When I meet a person I immediately see against the light the child that person was: I'm always interested in what kind of parents they had, what kind of childhood." Hence the choice to set the story in the "out of school", born from a first-hand experience during Covid, when to protect her daughter and other children in the building she invented a home school: "I began to understand the romantic potential of out of school: it is a place where we are so naked, where something escapes you. A child, if you explain it to him in childish language, understands everything: ambiguity kills him."
From childhood to writing as a cure, from motherhood to the superstitious streak
The story starts from Gamberale's home, that of her childhood: born in Rome to a father originally from Agnone, in Molise, and a mother from the province of Padua, "a very simple woman, who could not imagine having such a complex daughter from an early age". A "very emotional" child: placed in nursery by the nuns at three years old, she rebels - "if you don't take me away from those black ladies you can't touch me anymore" - and still remembers that sense of unfreedom today: "I was crying, I wanted to leave: there was something in that school that didn't make me feel free. Maybe the key word is Free All". Parents who, he says, "put themselves there to try to grow together with me, realizing that where there is a child who is not well there is always a family who is not well".
At school she defined herself as "perfect in classics, disastrous in chemistry", with some notes on her conduct: "I wasn't doing very well, I was restless: I was the school representative, we had been involved in a lot of politics". Writing came very early, at eight and a half years old, with a novel entitled 'Clare Ricchi': "I still have it, but I gave the sequel to a boyfriend at 23 and never got it back." The real debut, 'A Thin Life', came before the age of twenty, in a period marked by a long adolescent malaise: "I was so busy getting better that that publication wasn't so central." From that experience, she says, her idea of writing as a cure was also born: "If I hadn't turned this passion into a profession, I don't even know if I would be here today: my readers are the imaginary friends I played with as a child."
She is direct about her relationship with criticism: "Having had a very severe upbringing, I feel more at ease with criticism than with compliments" - even when they come from a master like the writer Walter Siti, who said of her: "Since she became a mother, something has softened a bit inside her." Motherhood came at the age of 40, with a pregnancy that was described as unlikely: "I knew it was a girl, the name was already ready because my father is called Vito." An experience that undermined her tendency to control and, at the same time, her creativity: "My creativity also went into crisis the moment Vita was born: this is the first novel, since she was born, in which I feel like I'm there again, that I've recovered." Today he talks about a bond that is still very symbiotic, which he is working on, and a type of love different from the sentimental one: "Something wonderful or terrible doesn't always have to happen: love is above all everyday life, it is the construction of a love". When asked what she would like her daughter to say about her when she grows up, she replies: "I would like her to think that I left her free to correspond to her desires, that I put her in a position to really listen to herself."
She says of herself: "I think I have the reputation of being a little crazy, too emotional, not always affectionate." There is no shortage of more personal sides: her greatest fear, she explains, is "that something will happen to me before my daughter is able to be independent". Imagining her own funeral, she would choose "the shores of Lake Trevignano, where I got married: I would like lots of music". He admits a superstitious streak – “the black cat, the ladder, the mirror” – and reveals that he always carries a lucky charm with him, a stone collected during a trip to Tibet, on the border with Nepal, during his university days, which he places in a precise position before starting to write. When asked which intense moment of happiness she would like to relive, the answer is linked to love: "All the times I fell in love: there weren't many, I think three in total. I would like to relive those moments".
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