Encountering that college textbook at her godforsaken high school unsettled Eleonora so completely that she quit writing her own work and began to “correct” the writing of others. The following year, in college in Milan, she attended a meeting for a graduate-student literary blog and volunteered to be their “proofreader,” a term learned, like others, that fateful day in high school. Meanwhile, she’d bought the Serianni grammar text and read from it daily. She commuted from a small town just outside Milan; her father was running for city council, and her brother was a policeman. The grad students had contacts who were real published authors; they interviewed them, and even went out with them at night. Eleonora began dating one of the youngest contributors, who hadn’t yet graduated, and she moved to Milan after that first year so she wouldn’t have to run home at dinnertime while the group was headed to someone’s place or to a reading at a bookstore. But this decision made her mother stop speaking to her for six months, and as a result, Eleonora lost ten pounds. Her boyfriend began to look after her, and she lived in his room and off his parents’ money; as a gift, he enrolled her in a short, introductory class on editing.

She almost never talked to me about those years: they were too hard, and every day, or almost every day, she wondered: When will I get to do real books, books that get excerpted in college textbooks? She detested how others found literature to be a nice way to pass the time with people they thought were better than average. She found it impossible to feel superior to others, to those who might be considered “average,” and she hadn’t rebelled from her “average” family, her politically involved father, her Catholic mother, her older, policeman brother—three people she considered honest and humane in spite of their ideological differences from her, along with their enormous prejudices. While she worked, she felt more like Montaigne than a modernist hipster like Fernanda Pivano, because only the logos, a force even older and more established than the grand narratives her family had suffocated her with, could allow her to choose her path with freedom.

As a result, she was ambivalent about the counterculture, with all its arrogant blowhards competing with her boyfriend, hitting on her to the beat of their musings on enormous tomes by Italian and American authors, all of them male—earnest, pretentious, and male—but deep down, she also knew she was lucky to have found a rich boy from Milan, a raft on the endless river flowing toward intellectual perfection. Around 2010, the couple moved to Rome because he was swimming in money and the blind faith of his professor parents, and so he enrolled in a creative writing workshop to make connections in the young, indie literary scene in Rome.