Forbidden Notebook

Published in Italy in 1952, this intimate, quietly subversive novel is told through the increasingly frantic secret diary entries of a woman named Valeria. Against a backdrop of postwar trauma and deprivation, Valeria struggles with her household’s finances, a romance with her boss, her husband’s professional dissatisfactions, and her grownup children’s love affairs. Confiding these tensions to her diary—the only outlet for expression in her cramped life—she awakens to society’s treatment of working wives and confronts a deep ambivalence toward her husband and children. She concludes that all women, to make sense of their world, “hide a black notebook, a forbidden diary. And they all have to destroy it.” New Yorker

Forbidden Notebook, by Alba de Céspedes, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Astra House).