Donato Carrisi and the fear of being a mother in “The Education of Butterflies”

THEthe new book by Donato Carrisi damages city mobility. The writer is a subway reader, and twice she missed the stop, immersed in this thriller which to define as “breathtaking” is an understatement.

Carrisi, as in all his novels, drags readers into intricate and frightening enigmas, but above all it descends into the minds of the characters with razor-sharp precision: it takes inspiration from the news, he says, and takes us into abysses that are both dark and disturbingly close to our fears. And thus raises the genre of suspense upwards.

In The education of butterfliesthere is it heartbreak of a mother who loses a daughterand who perhaps only notices the little girl after losing her.

The bad mother by Donato Carrisi

Serena, the protagonist, is a rich and unscrupulous broker. She doesn’t want to have children, Aurora is an accident that she can’t fix, she experiences motherhood as a punishment. So there is the story of a “bad mother”, a very thorny topic.
To describe Serena I listened to many people, even some friends who do not intend to become mothers. I find it unfair that men don’t have to justify themselves for such a desire while women do. I wanted to bring it back to a character who finds herself in spite of herself being a mother, even though she had planned a different outcome. An annoying topic, but I think a writer must ask himself these issues.

There is a different look at motherhood.
The inspiration was given to me by my eight-year-old son who one day asked me: “Do butterflies know that they were caterpillars?”. Does a mother know that she too is a mother before she becomes one? Is the maternal or parental instinct something rooted in us or does it arise later? In this sense Serena transforms and becomes a mother only when her daughter Aurora is declared missing, not when she gives birth to her.

In fact, at the beginning she is as if she were a stranger to her daughter, she puts a network of nannies, teachers, drivers around her, as if each provided a little piece of “mother”, a kind of artificial motherhood.
We parents sometimes confuse the task with the function, if we carry out the task we are at peace. We think that by giving everything to our children we have done our best. But our function is something different, it is listening and closeness. While we often delegate aspects of raising our children to strangers because work and life engulf us.

Serena’s motherhood seems to begin when her image of a winning woman crumbles.
He self-destructs, it’s the only way he can care about his daughter’s fate. Which also applies to a father. She allows herself to slide into a very private as well as self-destructive hell.

As in The girl in the fog the setting is in a very cold northern village, where you sink into deep snow: what place is Vion?
Vion is a bit like the sum of many mountain resorts. Strange places that during the tourist season seem open to the world but in the intervals between one season and another close in on themselves, the inhabitants return to being those of a hundred years ago, with their mistrust and their secrets. They are buffers, an aspect that I wanted in counterpoint to the double Milan that I describe, the high one, the city of mirrors, suspended between the clouds of skyscrapers and the low one, the teeming town that appears in the final pages. In the very different universe of Vion, Serena appears as an alien.

How did you start writing thrillers?
To prepare my degree thesis I followed the trial of Luigi Chiatti, a serial killer of children who took pleasure in being called “the monster”. He always recounted his misdeeds in great detail, he was 28 years old and he wanted to shock those who listened to him by having the visibility that he had not had throughout his life. I hated it, I felt disgusted. When I met him, the only thing he never wanted to talk about was his childhood, reconstructed in the trial through witnesses: a long chain of abuse and violence suffered by him as an adopted child. Somehow we were forced to feel compassion for that child who had encountered monsters. Far from wanting to justify, this short circuit between horror and compassion was interesting to stage. There will always be a wavering feeling for my monsters. But it’s part of human nature. There is no black and white, no good or bad, we are more fragile and complex than that.

Hard to accept.
If we don’t accept it we will never be able, not to control, but at least to identify the evil that surrounds us and is within us.

To write, in addition to reading crime news, have you met many murderers? What struck you?
Yes, I’ve met many of them, they all tell me more or less the same thing. Not social or professional killers, but those who killed only once. When they talk about what they did it’s as if they were amazed, as if they didn’t expect to become murderers. An amazement that has always struck me because it means that in some way we can all be conditioned by certain circumstances and lose control.

Why do we read thrillers or crime reports? Do they absolve us from something that scares us?
We are attracted to black stories because we delude ourselves that by looking evil in the face we will be able to recognize it. Which almost never happens because evil always comes in other guises and always manages to amaze us. And then, facing fear instead of running away from it is also a way to exorcise it. “Fear knocks on my door, my courage went to open it and found no one” wrote Nelson Mandela. Fears affect us too much, we should have more confidence in our ability to recognize and face them.

What is Donato Carrisi afraid of?

What are your fears?
I have told one of them in this book, that of losing something as precious as a child. As I was writing, my eight-year-old went to his first school camp in the mountains. For a week I lived with anxiety.

Autosuggestion… The children in your novels are often victims or in danger.
Fears are learned at an early age. We think we have overcome the dark one, but if I want I can recall it and make it try. I always turn to the child in the reader, and then childhood together with death is the thing that unites us all. The passage through childhood is the easiest way to reach the hearts of readers.

She takes inspiration from reality and does in-depth work on the psychology of the people involved. What do you think of Giulia Cecchettin’s terrible crime?
I would like it to be the beginning of something new but I fear that this story will be lost like so many others. There are no quick solutions, the issue is cultural, it requires collective reflection regarding masculinity. Forty years ago it was socially acceptable for the husband to beat his wife and for them to be stuck in the role of “broodmares”: things have changed but how long did it take? I have the impression that many are looking for quick answers, but I wonder: would Filippo Turetta have stopped with a harsher law? He destroyed the girl, her family and her own, he destroyed himself in a tragic vortex that the fear of punishment does not stop. We need books, films, cultural fabric: Cortellesi’s film goes beyond a thousand speeches, they should make it compulsory in schools.

What else can you tell us about your book, obviously without revealing too much of the plot?
Well, one time I was taking notes on my phone about an idea that had popped into my head. I missed the stop too…

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