I began learning to read when I was three.
Shelf Life
I was no child prodigy, and by any rate there was no need to start me off at such an early age, but I come from a genealogy of passionate state school educators and, detecting my curiosity towards books, my grandad must’ve got over-excited. Back then, I spent long afternoons at my grandparents’ house while my parents were at work, so he kept us both entertained by sticking the name of things onto the things themselves, so I could learn the shape of words. I would stalk around the house like a tentative, small god, naming the world around me: mirror, table, chair, chair, chair. Of course, I didn’t yet speak English then, so these things had other names in Italian: specchio, tavolo, sedia. When I learnt to read in English, I had to learn all new sounds and shapes, which overlapped with the old ones.
It seems hardly surprising, then, that for the longest time my relationship with language has relied on lists. Living and writing as I do, between two languages and two countries, I need help to bear it all in mind. Sometimes my lists are only comprehensible to me, full of inconsistencies, half written in one language, half in another. There are scraps of paper in my diary from ten years ago, in which I have recorded the items to bring with me when I moved away from home. It took ages to compile, but still, I forgot to bring a coat and had to brave the British winter in two jumpers.
I keep lists from other people that carry a conjuring kind of energy; finding them, years down the line, I am transported back to an exact place and time. There is a list of bad sexual innuendos my friend and I wrote on the last summer we spent together in our hometown, driving around in the stifling heat, bored, half-heartedly pursuing local boys, but really just revelling in each other’s company before our lives took their separate ways. There is the list of groceries another friend wrote as we were packing for our first holiday as ‘grown ups’: we turned up in Britain with 50-litre backpacks stuffed with bags of instant rice and rolling tobacco, as if those items wouldn’t be readily available in this country. There is one list of pro-and-cons that a boy penned about me in my own diary, on a weekend away at the seaside. He would’ve rather I was more mysterious, gave less away; instead, I broke it off with him. Still, the list remains, along with all the others, pressed in a notebook thick with sand grains, a piece of my identity.
These days I own at least two reliable coats, and my lists have acquired an unmistakable London quality, in that they tend to be filled with endless ‘to dos’ and make me feel quite anxious when I look at them. Still, they carry the marks of my home, my history: sometimes, when writing a shopping list, the letter Y appears at the end of ‘pomodori’, not quite ‘tomatoes’ in a British accent, nor the proper Italian spelling. This everyday confusion surprises me, but it also makes me happy. It reminds me I am me: a person made of fragments - but also, a writer, capable of rearranging them into stories.
SHELF LIFE is published by Doubleday on 29th August (£12.99)