The Life of Those Left Behind

In this heartbreaking yet hopeful autobiographical novel, an acclaimed Italian author who lost his partner to suicide testifies to the power of storytelling in living with grief.

When in 1999 30-year-old Matteo B. Bianchi published his debut novel—a scathing portrait of the sentimental education of a gay boy from Milan in the 1980s—the timing couldn’t be worse: he had just lost S., the man he’d lived with for 7 years, who one day, a few months after they broke up, decided to hang himself in their apartment.

Matteo is the first to find the body, to scream without being able to scream. From that day a “dark labyrinth” ensnares him, a whirlpool of suffering, made up of contradictory feelings and constant bewilderment, which unites all the so-called survivors of the suicide of a loved one. Matteo seems to be the unhappy protagonist of a rare event as he feels a unique pain, perversely special. However, at the same time, even in the darkest days, the writer who lives in him starts taking notes. At first, they are just fragments, shards of an existence shattered into a thousand pieces, echoes of feelings alive like nerves that Matteo reports unabashedly on the page. Then, they slowly transform and, memory after memory, become a profound and intimate conversation with S. and the pain, between the temptation to let go and the desire to get back to life.

Both radical and vulnerable, intimate and universal, The Life of Those Who Remain is a devastating but luminous novel about surviving the aftermath of trauma. Bianchi produces pages of excruciating beauty, recounting his journey to redemption, hope, and rebirth, and showing how, even in the depths of the most unspeakable pain, writing—his own, and also powerful works such as Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous—can still save.