Today’s the day. My first novel is officially out in the US. What a world.

Writers know it’s exhausting to talk about our work, especially if we have published it a long, long time ago. There’s one question that usually makes us -all genres and all styles- cringe a bit: what is it about? Unfortunately, we need to at least attempt. Lithium is the title of a song by Nirvana, the lyrics of the song say ‘I’m so happy cause today I found my friends, they are in my head’. There’s also a Nirvana song I think about when I make this attempt, About a Girl.

It’s the story of a girl who’s trapped but forced to take care of some kittens. I wrote this book when I was much younger, under very different circumstances, but my goal remains the same: to make readers feel rather than understand, to resist explanation, to avoid a single, neatly organized action unfolding in a classical narrative arc.

What emerges instead is a sense of connection colliding with a general state of isolation from the character, a strange transparency even in the midst of confusion. She is in a state of waiting. Waiting for what—for life to begin, perhaps? For someone to explain why everything seems to abandon her? For death, or for madness? As she waits, clues begin to surface: fragments, messages, signs. Her sense of self is fractured. What was meant to nurture her never managed to transmit an intuition of care. Will she make it back home? And what is home, anyway?

Images are essential. Each one matters. Through language and vision, they become the means by which she slowly begins to move—almost imperceptibly—out of where she is.