I’ve never tried to block out the memories of the past, even though some are painful. I don’t understand people who hide from their past. Everything you live through helps to make you the person you are now.
If you don’t have the roots somewhere, it’s very difficult for people to work with you. Because you are a different person from them. They don’t know you, really. They don’t know how you feel.
Without my mother’s ambition, her drive, I doubt that on my own I would have pushed myself out of Pozzuoli and into the frightening world that was faraway Rome.
