This book evoked many emotions in me, from rage to sympathy.

The narrator of this book is a wife and a mother. Everything else that makes her a person has been taken away from her, even her name. She now just "mama", even for her husband.

She writes a diary in secret. In the beginning she suggests to her family that she might write a diary also, and they straight up laugh at her. What would you have to write about?. Ha ha haa, they laugh benevolently.

Her children and her husband don't see her as a person, don't recognize that she might have thoughts and feelings. In their minds, she exists only for them. They take her service for granted and can't imagine anything else. Whatever she is irrelevant, not worth thinking about.

This makes you feel a lot of sympathy and frustration for Valeria. This book has a feminist message, but Valeria is not in an outright rebellion. She accepts and embraces the confines in which she lives it, yet struggles in the prison she's in. She's in constant conflict with herself, trying to make her own way in life, yet clinging to the traditional values and norms she has learned to live with. Possibly she feels the need to hold on to them, because if they are not true and right, what does that make of her? Has this life been for nothing?

Valeria is not a perfect person. While her family relies on her, she also relies on them for the sake of her identity and her purpose in life. She refuses to let go of her children, fighting tooth and nail against the modernizing world that her children are eager to accept.

Her relationship with her daughter Mirella is especially strained. Mirella is infuriatingly childish, especially in the beginning, but Valeria treats her like a misbehaving child. She cannot accept Mirella having a career and, as it is revealed, values and thoughts of her own.

Valeria is also hostile against her son Ricardo's girlfriend due to her own insecurities. She wants both girls to enter the same confines that she lives in, at whatever cost. She is controlling, insecure, submissive, angry, tired. This makes her a very well-rounded character.

The reason why this isn't a 5 star for me is because I just didn't find the housewifery very interesting, even though that was kind of the point of the book. Valeria is a very average woman in a very normative position. The book shows the everyday struggles of an unremarkable woman, which is a remarkable feat. Still, I was sometimes kind of bored.

This is not a flaw of the book, but I feel like I didn't know enough about Italian history to fully understand everything. Overall, I'm happy to have read this book.