by Marta Cerreti
In January 2022, I met with Italian contemporary writer Teresa Ciabatti to discuss her latest works and her experience as a woman writer in a male-dominated industry. By drawing on Ciabatti’s best-known work La più amata (2017), the title of this interview addresses a common issue for women writers: they are welcome in the literary industry provided they follow the established rules. Since 2017, Teresa Ciabatti has continuously broken conventions, with regard to both the form and the content of her works. This has granted her the status of the least beloved among contemporary writers, while her writing has often been discredited as a parody. The interview is composed of three sections. In the first part, “Autofiction,” Ciabatti discusses the process that brought her to write the autofictional work La più amata (2017) as well as the criticisms she received for naming the arrogant protagonist of the book after her. The second part of the interview, “Dolls,” assesses Ciabatti’s obsession with dolls and functions as an interlude to the third section, “Feminism,” in which Ciabatti explains her take on maternity. Ciabatti’s latest book, Sembrava bellezza (2021), proposes a taxonomy of the incapable, wicked woman which echoes and simultaneously complicates the feminist debate about motherhood and selfhood. In conclusion, throughout the interview, Ciabatti praises contemporary literature for its capacity to narrate the silences, the misunderstandings, and the inessential parts of life. Recounting the unpleasant ways in which one grows and regresses several times in a day is, for Ciabatti, the most liberating gift that literature can grant us.