But the warmth and comfort of that place came from Barbara’s past: from her misery at not having a room to herself growing up. Barbara’s parents separated when she was two. When she was a teenager, an insensitive aunt told her: “You know what the problem was? Your parents couldn’t stand two years of your bad tonsils: food would get caught in your tonsils, and you were too small for surgery, so you always had infections and your parents never got any sleep…” Her mother and father quickly built new families. Her father would have two boys and was extremely attached to her, his girl: but unfortunately, his new wife, when her stepdaughter was a teenager—especially after Barbara discovered her tonsils had been the cause of her family’s being pulled apart—became a stepmother right out of a fairy tale, strict and mean, and with the excuse of making the girl more refined (she was a teacher at Barbara’s high school), made her feel stupid, which was not how she treated her sons. Barbara lived at her father’s every other weekend, and the rest of the time the family went on as a family, without her, and her room doubled as a storeroom, a place to iron, a bed for the babysitter. If they had guests when she was there, if a grandmother came to see her grandchildren, Barbara slept on a cot set up in the living room, behind a couch, by the window. Her brothers were two years apart, and she was older than the youngest by seven years.

At her mother’s, it was much better—until middle school—when her mother had a daughter with her new partner, something she’d resisted for years, afraid of how it might affect Barbara, but finally she did get pregnant, and since there wasn’t much money, when Barbara’s little half sister was three, the two of them were put in a room together: the thirteen-year-old with the three-year-old in twelve square meters. Their place had two floors, and Barbara started staying downstairs, sleeping on the couch and keeping her things in the large drawer at the base of the bookshelf.