Violetta
Bellocchio

‘We agree to become addicted to something because addiction is life in its purest form: addiction is blood and bones and seed and water, teeth and sweat, skin, fire; addiction brings us to our knees before something we do not understand. It is difficult to give it up because it is impossible to accept that nothing will ever make us feel like that again.’
Violetta Bellocchio has chosen to look back on three years of alcoholism, between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-eight – three years that seem to have dissolved into a prolonged blackout. On the advice of her sobriety coach, she isolates herself for a month in a country house with a specific aim: to piece her life back together. She takes with her a notebook and the desire to tell the truth, whatever the cost, one word a day. The rules are strict: no lies, no fabrications, no visitors. Thus, over twenty-eight days and in twenty-eight words, the uncertain and treacherous path of detoxification unfolds, along with the fragile yet tenacious will to reconnect with oneself. Because the body, she feels, never forgets.
This memoir is the brutal and lyrical account of a possession. But it is also an attempt to transform shame into a sharp knife and anger into a spark. *The Body Never Forgets*, already a cult classic, returns in a new, revised and expanded edition, to surprise us once more with the clarity of its vision and the ruthlessness that knows how to become compassion, in the recognition of our weaknesses but also of our possibilities for redemption.