Why am I passionate about this?

Iā€™ve always been sensitive to my material environment, discerning the spiritual and emotional effects of light, color, and sound in everyday life, like our clothes and homes and also in nature. However, for years, I lived in my head. Iā€™d relegated my body and intuition to the sidelines. For two decades, I built a career in visual art, but it took the mid-life collapse of everything Iā€™d wanted to find my way back to the authenticity of those early sensibilities, charting an artistā€™s way home. The creative life is not just for artists. It sustains our humanity in times of darkness and is the source of our brightest future.


I wrote

Getting Dressed in the Dark

By Gabriella D'Italia,

Book cover of Getting Dressed in the Dark

What is my book about?

My book is an evocative memoir exploring the complexities of love, betrayal, and the healing power of art. When Robā€¦

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of Still Life with Oysters and Lemon

Gabriella D'Italia Why did I love this book?

This book's investment in objects of art and the everyday deepened my relationship with the most mundane aspects of my daily life. I began to see the world around me as a lens for self-knowledge.

The book's intimate reflections ignited in me a day-to-day creativity that has transformed the would-be-ordinary into the beautiful. Here the material world is a gateway to our humanity. I read this book for the first time over twenty years ago and it has stayed present and relevant for me ever since.

By Mark Doty,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Still Life with Oysters and Lemon as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Mark Doty's prose has been hailed as "tempered and tough, sorrowing and serene" (The New York Times Book Review) and "achingly beautiful" (The Boston Globe). In Still Life with Oysters and Lemon he offers a stunning exploration of our attachment to ordinary things-how we invest objects with human store, and why.


Book cover of Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir

Gabriella D'Italia Why did I love this book?

This story of individuation shines as a beacon. The juxtaposition of identity, ancestral stories, and creativity told distinctly in an artistā€™s voice cracked open for me a world that is at once relatable and completely, necessarily idiosyncratic.

I felt the world of the book color my everyday experiences as this story weaves together life and art, as well as extends the honest relationship an artist must have with the material world into the most intimate of material relationships: the one we have with our own body. These most mundane relationships are shown as inseparable from our humanity as creative beings. This book inspired me to look at my relationships as a mirror for self-discovery. 

By Akwaeke Emezi,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Dear Senthuran as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

FEATURED ON THE COVER OF TIME MAGAZINE AS A 2021 NEXT GENERATION LEADER

ā€œA once-in-a-generation voice.ā€ ā€“ Vulture

ā€œOne of our greatest living writers.ā€ ā€“ Shondaland

A full-throated and provocative memoir in letters from the New York Times bestselling author, ā€œa dazzling literary talent whose works cut to the quick of the spiritual selfā€ (Esquire)

In three critically acclaimed novels, Akwaeke Emezi has introduced readers to a landscape marked by familial tensions, Igbo belief systems, and a boundless search for what it means to be free. Now, in this extraordinary memoir, the bestselling author of The Death of Vivek Ojiā€¦


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Book cover of The Inhabitants

The Inhabitants by Beth Castrodale,

Artist Nilda Ricci could use a stroke of luck. She seems to get it when she inherits a shadowy Victorian, built by an architect whose houses were said to influence the mindā€”supposedly, in beneficial ways. At first, Nildaā€™s new home delivers, with the help of its longtime housekeeper. And Nildaā€¦

Book cover of Just Kids

Gabriella D'Italia Why did I love this book?

I got lost in the detailed universe of young people growing by a bread-crumb trail, one small creative act at a time, into the famous artists they are known as today. Whether itā€™s hopping on a bus to New York City, setting up a studio practice in a shabby apartment, to honing a voice in particular media, be it photography or music, this chronicles idiosyncratic choices, creative exploration, and the coalescing of kindred communities.

In a unique time and place, a certain status quo was traded for a microcosm that allowed kids who trusted each other and their own curiosities to pave the way forward. It is a portrait of artists being born, teased out, from the fabric of everyday life.

By Patti Smith,

Why should I read it?

16 authors picked Just Kids as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

ā€œReading rocker Smithā€™s account of her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, itā€™s hard not to believe in fate. How else to explain the chance encounter that threw them together, allowing both to blossom? Quirky and spellbinding.ā€ -- People

It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation.

Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Bound in innocenceā€¦


Book cover of All Fours

Gabriella D'Italia Why did I love this book?

Despite the protagonist in this book embarking on one compulsive and distinctive adventure after another, I couldnā€™t help but see my journey in her steps, even as they unfolded to destroy the life she worked for and believed she wanted. In a novel that reads like a memoir, I followed a womanā€™s path from a conventional life to one of authenticity.

Her new world opens up, perilous, quirky, and deeply libidinal, giving me access to a story that could only be singular and unique. I was emboldened to see allegiance to personal truth, a kind of curiosity, as a radical path to freedom, the kind of freedom that makes way for others.

By Miranda July,

Why should I read it?

24 authors picked All Fours as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

The New York Times bestselling author returns with an irreverently sexy, tender, hilarious and surprising novel about a woman upending her life

ā€œA frank novel about a midlife awakening, which is funnier and more boldly human than you ever quite expectā€¦.the bravery of All Fours is nothing short of riveting.ā€ā€”Vogue

ā€œA novel that presses into that tender bruise about the anxiety of aging, of what it means to have a female body that is aging, and wanting the freedom to live a fuller lifeā€¦Deeply funny and achingly true.ā€ ā€”LA Times
 
ā€œAll Fours possessed me.ā€¦


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Book cover of Dear Alderone

Dear Alderone by Ami Hendrickson,

Jera Fowler is hardly excited about having to keep a journal for ninth-grade English class. ā€œWhat can happen in a day?ā€ she grumps as she chronicles the 1984-85 school year. She doesnā€™t realize that a single day can be the dividing line between life and death. Forty years later, whileā€¦

Book cover of Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

Gabriella D'Italia Why did I love this book?

I grew up in the suburbs of a big city in an Italian American family that valued the ā€œAmerican Dream.ā€ The path to success was marked by academic achievement and financial gain. These were among many tacit beliefs and stories, right alongside what it means to be in a marriage and to have children, that led me on a decades-long journey straight into the mid-life collapse of all Iā€™d worked towards.

Frangelloā€™s account of conditions, events, and an underlying, perilous terrain of female identity and romantic ideology treads so close to my own experience of catastrophic relational collapse and betrayal. As in my own life, the crisis extends backward and forwards in time, unearthing the buried ground on which I inadvertently founded my dreams and built my life. This book is a lens that reframed my history and refocused my future.

By Gina Frangello,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Blow Your House Down as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice ā€¢ A Good Morning America Recommended Book ā€¢ A LitReactor Best Book of the Year ā€¢ A BuzzFeed Most Anticipated Book of the Year ā€¢ A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of the Year ā€¢ A Rumpus Most Anticipated Book of the Year ā€¢ A Bustle Most Anticipated Book of the Month
 
"A pathbreaking feminist manifesto, impossible to put down or dismiss. Gina Frangello tells the morally complex story of her adulterous relationship with a lover and her shortcomings as a mother, and in doing so, highlights the forces that shaped, silenced,ā€¦


Explore my book šŸ˜€

Getting Dressed in the Dark

By Gabriella D'Italia,

Book cover of Getting Dressed in the Dark

What is my book about?

My book is an evocative memoir exploring the complexities of love, betrayal, and the healing power of art. When Rob confesses his affair with Gabriellaā€™s young friend, it shatters their decades-long bond built on radical honesty and unravels the unconventional life they had carefully constructed. Robā€™s betrayal rips apart not only their marriage but the foundation of their shared lifeā€™s creative work.

Through the lens of devastation, this raw memoir journeys through the aftermath, reflecting on the meaning of art, trust, and identity. With poetic insight, it contemplates what remains when the story you believed in most collapsesā€”and how, for an artist, the material world reveals a hopeful image of the way forward.

Book cover of Still Life with Oysters and Lemon
Book cover of Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir
Book cover of Just Kids

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