“Anyone who has once known this land can never be quite free from the nostalgia for it,” D.H. Lawrence said about Sicily. The statement counts double for the Aeolian Islands and triple for the island of Alicudi, a gem in the Mediterranean Sea that has been a refuge for my family for 34 years. The island is too steep for cars or roads; instead, hundreds of steps have been built to the top of a now-defunct crater.
My mother and I half-jokingly called the Alicudi house that belonged to my family our “room of one’s own.” Whenever my mother was working on a book, often books that took place on the island or were in some way involved in its history, she would come here. And when I visited her, it became that for me too. But sometimes, to have a room of your own, you have to work extra hard. Getting there required taking a flight to Palermo, a boat to the island, transferring your belongings onto a donkey, and climbing 450 steps. (Everything has to be carried up by donkeys: groceries, suitcases, water, sometimes even furniture, hoisted slowly along the same ancient routes.) Both of my parents are writers, but this was my mother’s space. It was the place she could go to be alone with her thoughts and her work. By the time you reach the top, you have shed, or sweated out, months of city life. The creative payoff, after so much effort, always felt incredibly earned.
The house came into our family thanks to my mother’s wildly adventurous brother, who fixed up a ruin on the island in the late ‘80s, and we’ve been going there since 1992. I have a clear memory of listening to “Rhythm Is a Dancer” on a Walkman, lying on a limestone bisuolo overlooking the sea, absolutely bored by the absence of activity or social gatherings. And yet, even as a young girl, I knew I should be grateful for the boredom and stillness that forced me to create worlds out of rocks, sun, and sea—worlds that have stayed in much of my work and consciousness.
Later in life, when my family moved to America and summer visits were harder to organize, a craving for that primordial silence bonded me to my mother. My brother and I had complicated adolescences—shaped by the proximity of gangs and drugs and the pull of all the wrong paths—but knowing the island would be there waiting for us was a balm. Even later, when I began to share my life with the screenwriter who is the father of my children and quiet and solitude had to be constantly negotiated, the house in Alicudi became an answer. The sun-warmed bedrooms, the smell of jasmine rising at night, the salty breeze moving through the open shutters—it was a place that existed outside of the compromises that come with marriage.
