Don't Write About Me

“Don't Write About Me, harsh and sharp as a blade, is a novel that only Veronica Raimo could write with such skill, combining her characteristic lightness, precision and (almost) cheer.”—Vincenzo Latronico, author of Perfection

From the Italian bestseller and International Booker–Longlisted author comes a daring new novel that explores desire, trauma, and the lingering narratives that shape our lives

Dennis May is dead. To the world, it’s a brief, forgettable news item. To S., it’s the wrong ending to her own story. At thirty-five, S. is not where she expected to be, working in a café and lying to her parents about a degree she never finished. She despises almost everything and has turned failure into a way of life—and she owes it all to Dennis.

The last time S. saw Dennis May in person—Dennis May alive—she was wearing dark jeans and a low-cut emerald-green sweater. Now those clothes lie buried in the cellar inside a plastic bag, centerpiece of a private museum of horrors: a Nokia phone filled with Dennis’s old messages, and an autographed poster of Polaris, the film that briefly turned Dennis into a sex symbol for a niche of people who would never admit to using that expression. While the public’s collective crush on Dennis faded quickly, S. held fiercely to her own, private obsession, even through his bad reviews and embarrassing interviews. She protected it even when, the last time she saw him alive, he raped her and vanished from her life.

With this magnetic and unsettling novel, Veronica Raimo explores the absurdity that accompanies tragedy and the idea that what defines our lives—more than what has happened—is what we keep waiting for.