Gianni is a girl in her early teens who suddenly begins to feel bad about her appearance, her friends, her parents, and her school. In short, she is becoming a teenager. She says:
I felt like a failure, like a cake made with the wrong ingredients
I think I’ve largely forgotten how excruciating it was to be an adolescent, but this book made me remember.
Guiliana turned and whispered: Gianni, what are you doing, come on, you’ll get lost. Oh, if I really could get lost, I thought at one point, leave myself somewhere, like an umbrella, and never have anything more to do with me.
Oh god! Poor girl. She is having a particularly rough go of it. Her parents are getting a divorce, and not in a kind of lets-all-go-to-therapy kind of way, more in a lets-scream-a-lot kind of way. She responds by wearing black clothing, giving blowjobs to unsuitable much older men, etc. She also relentlessly pursues her cousin’s fiance, with no guilt at all, as only the profoundly insecure can do.
Finally she runs away on a train with her best friend’s annoying younger sister. This last line killed me:
On the train, we promised each other to become adults as no one ever had before.
Everyone thinks they are going to break the mould.