“According to Eve”

When I was seventeen, Eleanor Rigby was thirty-three. Her song, I mean.
It was March 1999, I had come up with the idea of inventing a new life for her, more accurate than the delusive and emaciated shadow the Beatles had confined her in. The story of an angel – a certain Eleanor R., mine – who had scattered stars in the sky. Well, they weren’t exactly stars; they were shining white granules, like grains of rice slipped out of her hand while she was running inebriated towards the other side of the sky. And she had arrived running, obviously, to go and hug John Lennon.
I was soaked with that song. My mother, who was really fond of the Beatles, had told me Eleanor R.’s story a hundred times; even her unpublished short story was based on that text. The astonishing story of Eleanor, father McKenzie’s sister, who ends up with no memory and no love, commemorated in her brother’s sermon, on the day of a deserted funeral. Then buried in a garden in eastern Scotland, where rootless, horny cats go and cry.

 

Il mio romanzo in inglese (“According to Eve”) comincia così. Ho ricevuto il testo stasera e uscirà a breve nel mercato angloamericano… E ogni notazione riguardo al mio stato d’animo di scrittrice, scrittrice edita da piccolo editore coraggioso, è davvero superflua: tanta gratitudine.