One Italian Summer
Rebecca Serle, 2022
A daughter grieving her mother takes the Italian trip they planned together, and the coast begins to rearrange what she knows about love and marriage.
Feels like grief, longing and tenderness. About family, love and memory.
A page from the book
Grief arrives as a list of ordinary things that will never happen again.
I cannot yet conceive of a world without her, what that will look like, who I am in her absence. I am incapable of understanding that she will not pick me up for lunch on Tuesdays, parking without a permit on the curb by my house and running inside with a bag full of something—groceries, skin-care products, a new sweater she bought at Off 5th. I cannot comprehend that if I call her phone, it will just ring and ring—that there is no longer anyone on the other end who will say, “Katy, honey. Just a second. My hands are wet.” I do not imagine ever coming to terms with the loss of her body—her warm, welcoming body. The place I always felt at home. My mother, you see, is the great love of my life. She is the great love of my life, and I have lost her. Rebecca Serle.One Italian Summer (2022) became a New York Times bestseller; Serle is also the author of In Five Years and The Dinner List.
Books that feel like this
More by Rebecca Serle
In Five Years
Rebecca Serle, 2020
A woman who has built her life on plans gets a five-year glimpse of a future she never chose—and has to decide what to do with the present.
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Questions readers ask
- What is One Italian Summer like?
- Feels like grief, longing and tenderness. About family, love and memory.
- What should I read after One Italian Summer?
- If you liked One Italian Summer, try It's Not Summer Without You (Jenny Han), The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy) and It Ends with Us (Colleen Hoover).
A taste of the feed
Grief makes a person feel like a stranger to their own life.
I wasn’t in Cousins. Conrad and I weren’t together, and Susannah was dead. Nothing would ever be the same again. It had been—How many days had it been? How many days exactly?—two months since Susannah had died and I still couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t let myself believe it. When a person you love dies, it doesn’t feel real. It’s like it’s happening to someone else. It’s someone else’s life. I’ve never been good with the abstract. What does it mean when someone is really and truly gone?
It's Not Summer Without You · Jenny Han
What a house becomes when no one has been living in it.
“It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenem. Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth, plowing it up like gunfire. The old house on the hill wore its steep, gabled roof pulled over its ears like a low hat. The walls, streaked with moss, had grown soft, and bulged a little with dampness that seeped up from the ground. The wild, overgrown garden was full of the whisper and scurry of small lives. In the undergrowth a rat snake rubbed itself against a glistening stone. Hopeful yellow bullfrogs cruised the scummy pond for mates. A drenched mongoose flashed across the leaf strewn driveway.
The God of Small Things · Arundhati Roy
Wanting to disappear completely, and to be loved completely, in the same breath.
Yes I would like he thinks to live in such a way that I could vanish into thin air at any time without affecting anyone and in fact I feel that for me this would constitute the perfect and perhaps the only acceptable life. At the same time I want desperately to be loved.
Intermezzo · Sally Rooney
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