When our parents insisted it didn’t make sense for her to go to the University of Bologna, it was the same sort of dream I’ve called into question here about how Irene rejected therapy. It wasn’t an order, wasn’t advice, wasn’t their opinion. It was the structure of the universe. “You don’t go away for college.” When a parent says that, it becomes natural law. That’s the sort of family we grew up in: orders weren’t doled out, but every declaration became fact. The talks my parents had with Irene were practical, reasonable; month after month she brought up her request and was told: “But it’s not necessary, not practical.” They were concerned about the university environment: “It’s particular, the University of Bologna, it has a tradition…” My parents didn’t devalue nonconformism, had been part of the spirit of ’68, helping the poor and discussing Mao’s Little Red Book with their parish friends (all future atheists, except them), and so they avoided overtly pious pronouncements and were always reasonable. Our mother’s method was to point out what lay hidden behind a nonconformist choice: “Just having fun? Drifting?” In her opinion, it was “a kind of ideology that anything is possible … the flipside to commitment and open-mindedness is the myth of absolute freedom.” These calm discussions turned me and Luca into two typical middle-class kids, romantic yet obedient, while Irene just wrote my parents off; androgynous, in her dark clothes, dirty red hair pulled back in a ponytail, by around 9:00 p.m., after exhausting everyone at dinner, then our parents on their own in the living room, watching the political debates, Irene would scream, “You’re stonewalling me!,” and she’d escape to her room or head out for a walk, sneaking a cigarette with one of her dreamy hetero girlfriends. In our eyes, by doing these things, she conceded the moral victory to our parents, so docile before this force of nature who was “dug in and there’s no moving her.” “But we’re here in Rome—the cradle of education!” Luca and I kept insisting to her, parroting our parents.

Then just like that, shortly before her exit exam, my father gave his permission.

In Bologna, Irene immediately went into a state that even to this day she’s never explained, and that we only found out about, one day around Christmas, when we discovered she was wearing a wig, that her hair had fallen out.

It seemed like drugs had to be involved, and yet they weren’t. The truth is, we thought it had to be drugs, but we also didn’t believe it: we needed to think this, couldn’t believe this—