Lost on Me

Raimo (The Girl at the Door) turns her well-honed satirical gaze inward in this winning work of autofiction. The narrator, Veronica, grows up in 1980s Rome with an overprotective father who douses her in rubbing alcohol at the first sign of any ailment. Her mother, meanwhile, favors Veronica’s older brother and imagines nightmarish scenarios involving his kidnapping or death whenever he’s out of the house. Veronica and her brother grow up to be writers and tangle over who should immortalize their eccentric family in books: “I envied siblings who argued over an inheritance, over a house,” Veronica reflects, a shard of truth in her generally unreliable narration (elsewhere, she claims to fear “truth more than death”). A fabulist from a family of fabulists, Veronica offers up memories on one page only to question or revise them on the next. This haziness extends to her outward appearance, as friends and even her mother have difficulty recognizing her. The shambolic text flits between childhood and adulthood, doomed affairs and friendships, ribaldry (flashers, masturbation, constipation), and a revelation about the private life of Veronica’s father. Despite the narrator’s evasiveness, a thrum of honesty bleeds through. With its stellar voice, Raimo’s inquisitive and vulnerable novel proves tough to put down. (June)