BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS

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Of her daughter Mirella, Valeria writes: “I wonder if there is not more compassion in the coldness with which she protects her life than in the weakness with which I agree to let mine be devoured.” Valeria is accused of being jealous of Mirella. Do you think this is true? How does the relationship between mother and daughter evolve over the course of the novel? What do they learn from each other?

The economic hardships of Italians during and after WWII play a key role in this novel—from the laws restricting the sale of paper goods to housewives like Valeria having to work outside the home. How do these financial constraints affect Valeria’s marriage? How do they affect her perception of her boss’s advances and of Mirella’s relationship with the well-off Cantoni?

Toward the end of the book, Valeria writes: “Although I’ve always given myself to others, completely, it seems to me that I still have everything to give.” How is this emblematic of Valeria’s choices and the choices of so many women? And does Mirella’s boundary-setting save her from her mother’s fate?

“From the novel’s first line—“I was wrong to buy this notebook, very wrong”— the notebook is equally freighted with self-flagellating judgment and a burning, mysterious desire. Unbeknownst to her husband and children, Valeria begins to keep a record of her observations and feelings, first haltingly, then with increasing urgency and insight. Her practice of writing becomes one of shocking selfrecognition, as she begins to reacquaint herself with the person she is—or could be—outside the restrictive role she plays in the family . . . it is the very smallness of Forbidden Notebook’s scope that makes it so powerful.”

—SARAH

CHIHAYA, The New Yorker

“The book has been newly revived by Ann Goldstein . . . Its voice remains lively and compelling, and the subjects depressingly perennial: the battle between motherhood and self-actualization; social control over women’s bodies; unpaid emotional and domestic labor; the forces of progress pressing up against the ceiling of convention . . . This is a brilliant, quietly tumultuous book and a welcome revival of an author too little known in the anglophone world.”

“The voice seizes our attention at once: forceful, clear and morally engaged . . . It’s political in a wider sense, examining a form of suppression that women recognize as global: the suppression of their thoughts.”

ROXANA ROBINSON, The Washington Post

“De Cespedes’ work has lost none of its subversive force. . . . Forbidden Notebook promises a new cohort of readers, appetites whetted by the works of Elena Ferrante, Elsa Morante and Natalia Ginzburg. Goldstein, who has a particular skill for conveying the full power of a woman’s emotional register, for locating an undertow of wrath or grief even in stated ambivalence, has reinvigorated the text.”

—JOUMANA KHATIB, The New York Times Book Review

“A gripping slow-burn of a book. Domestic mundanity and the impulse toward freedom combine in this critique of marriage, family and fascism . . . Valeria arrives at innumerable clear-eyed epiphanies regarding gender, class and the passage of time, many of them rather unpleasant. But one of de Céspedes’ points seems to be that real liberation is never comfortable or easy—a fact which, if anything, makes that state of being all the more worth pursuing.”

—KATHLEEN

ROONEY,

Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Astounding . . . Forbidden Notebook does not feel 71 years old. Its prose is fresh and lively, and the issues it raises more contemporary than many would hope.”

—LILY MEYER, NPR