"Take the readers by the hand, invite them into the house, look at the photos of childhood together to tell the most unspeakable part of themselves and their family. Roberto Alajamo, in his most necessary and personal work, has transformed an intimate and painful material into the novel of a lifetime. July 1978: the writer is a student waiting for the oral examination, he studies with his classmates in Mondello, near Palermo, and at the end of the day goes out with them to rest, take a breath, eat an ice cream. A couple of thirty meters away, sitting on the sidewalk, he finds his mother. She looks at him, shielding herself from the sun with her hand. "Mom, what are you doing here?". And the last meeting between Elena and her son Roberto, the moment from which this book springs, the family investigation of a writer on an event that marked his youth and his maturity: the whole existence. And the story of a goodbye that the boy had had no sense of, the search for meaning for the sudden departure of a mother from her husband, children, life itself. The portrait of a woman who wanted to grasp the world, and the world escaped her fingers. A drama of domestic discomfort perhaps if they consumed so many, in those years, in the closed secret of the apartments of the Italian bourgeoisie. And a story of great literary originality, crossed by a suspense that sometimes takes your breath away, from an emotion that is careful to transform into thought." --Translated from page 2 of cover.