Zakázaný deník

One Sunday in 1950, one middle-aged woman, one black-covered notebook: we live as best we can, as we have been taught. But what if that is not enough?

The Forbidden Diary was first published from December 1950 to June 1951 in the weekly magazine La Settimana Incom illustrata, which perhaps unfairly pigeonholed it as a serialized novel. It was then published in book form by Mondadori in 1952.

The main theme of the diary novel is writing. Writing as an act of liberation, self-discovery, contemplation, and rebellion.

The novel's protagonist and narrator, Valeria, works as a clerk, has a reliable husband and two children who are about to leave the family nest. We find ourselves in Rome in 1950: the time of writing the diary corresponds to the time when the text was published in a magazine. The seemingly banal introduction, in which Valeria goes to the newsagent's to buy cigarettes for her husband and, on a sudden impulse, buys a "forbidden" black-covered notebook (forbidden because only tobacco products were allowed to be sold on Sundays), kicks off the heroine's journey to herself, to reflection on her daily routine and its confrontation with her own desires and dreams. Not only does Valeria not have "a room of her own," to quote Virginia Woolf, but she also has nowhere to hide her diary, and in the well-established family routine, she has to struggle to steal time for herself and her writing, on which she gradually becomes dependent. She confronts her traditionalist mother and progressive daughter and realizes that she is unhappy in the life they raised her for and predestined her to live. Yet she is not a Bovary-esque heroine; she does not want to be a victim of literature, but rather—though she does not fully realize it—an author.