The books I carried — from a kitchen table in Solara to a library across an ocean. Every one of them is real. You can read them too.
A person is partly made of the books she reads at the right age. Mine came to me in a particular order — a garden I hid a letter inside, a boy who climbed into the trees and would not come down, a poet whose single unfinished verb I once chased for three days. I have spent my life carrying words from one language into another, deciding what to keep and what to let fall. These are the books that taught me the trade before I knew it was a trade. I have set them here on one shelf, in the order they found me, so that you might take one down.
Read by lamplight at a kitchen table, and on a low wall behind the church.
I kept his letter inside it, pressed flat against the page where the garden comes back to life — no one ever looked there. I understood, even then, that some doors you keep shut on purpose, and some you are only pretending to.
“If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.”Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden
I read it twice through in one winter and then made Luca take it apart with me, line by line, on the low wall behind the church where the afternoon sun collected. A boy climbs into the trees and refuses, for the whole of his life, to come down. I did not yet know I would spend mine deciding which things to carry across and which to leave up where they were.
“That winter I read it twice through, and then made Luca take it in pieces on the low wall behind the church.”The Parts That Stay
We began with Dante, always. Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso — hell, purgatory, and heaven, as if a life could be sorted so cleanly. Years later, in America, they teased me for loving him too much. I never learned to love him less.
“Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.”Dante, Inferno · trans. Longfellow
Asked, at sixteen, for a favorite writer — these are the two I said.
When someone asked me for a favorite writer, I said her name first. She wrote families the way they actually are — held together less by love than by the private words only they can say, the phrases that mean nothing to anyone outside the kitchen. I have been collecting those words ever since.
“I like how they write about family, about memory.”The Parts That Stay
The other name I gave that night. She wrote memory as a kind of weather — something a family lives inside without ever quite being able to describe it. I wanted to write like that long before I would admit I wanted to write at all.
“Some things you carry untranslated.”The Parts That Stay
A dog-eared volume behind a velvet curtain — and a single verb I chased for three days.
Matteo pulled a thin, dog-eared Montale from behind the velvet curtain and put it in my hands, and something in me caught and did not let go. I have bought three editions since, looking for that one. Years later I spent three months of Sundays arguing a single one of his verbs across a table, and lost track of which I loved more — the poem, or the argument.
“Meriggiare is chosen — almost a discipline. A man deciding to disappear into an afternoon.”The Parts That Stay
Three days I spent on a single line of his. Death will come and it will have your eyes. In English “will have” is flat — mere possession, death owning the eyes. In the Italian there is an arrival in it: death comes wearing them, carrying them toward you. That gap is the whole of my work, and very nearly the whole of this book.
“Death comes wearing them. Carrying them toward you.”The Parts That Stay
In a library that smelled of paper and pine polish, an ocean from home.
This one belonged to a boy in the library, held loosely against his bag. Careful, he said, that’s how it starts — and it was how I learned to branch out, slowly. An American book, open-handed and unashamed, the opposite of everything I had been taught to fold up small. I read it the way you try on a country.
“I am large, I contain multitudes.”Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
There were others my fingers only traced as I passed — Pirandello, Pavese — familiar names on a library shelf, lingered on and left for later. A shelf is never finished. It only waits for who you are about to become.
Translator, traitor. It is the first thing they teach you, and the last thing you understand. Some words you do not carry across at all. You escort them, and you let them keep their coat on.
The first chapter of The Parts That Stay is yours, free — the girl, the hills, and the book open on her knees.