Alice Urciuolo: "Books and women have saved my life"

"I’ve talked to sixteen-year-olds. Not anymore, though, but not out of spite!" It’s only natural to ask Alice Urciuolo – born in '94, with two novels to her name and a nomination for the Strega prize – how she manages to capture that indefinable age spanning from early to full adolescence so well. Indefinable because it’s a time when we are everything, but not yet complete. We are young, but not too young to approach the adult world. We’re not adults, but we can no longer rely on the leniency granted to children. We’re humans in transition, and what unites us all is that we’ve all been there. Alice Urciuolo, too, who reveals: "Many of the stories and projects I envisioned were completed before I turned twenty-five. In this field, projects have a long gestation period; something you’re writing now might not come out until years later."

She started working as a story editor for Cross Media, where she remained for four years, and was immediately put to work on Skam for three seasons (she describes herself as "the right person at the right time") and continued to explore adolescence with the series Prisma, which she co-created with Ludovico Bessegato – canceled after its second season by Prime Video – a project she jumped into after meeting Giovanna Cristina Vivinetto, a trans poet she met at university who wrote a poetry book about her transition.

Alice Urciuolo’s New Adventure with Adorazione on Netflix

On November 20, Netflix will release the series based on her first novel, Adorazione, published in 2020, a story about the death of young Elena and its impact on those who knew her. "I was twenty-four when I started writing it, in the midst of processing my own adolescence, which allowed me to create a more structured narrative," the author confides. "It may sound annoying, but I started my career, especially in the TV industry, somewhat by chance. I enrolled in a course to learn writing tools, and right after the internship, I was hired. It happened at the same time as I developed a passion for cinema, which fueled my imagination. But all my peers were living different lives from mine, and I felt very alone, with no one to relate to, either inside or outside the workplace," she adds, reflecting on her journey. A discomfort fed by the Italian mindset that struggles to take you seriously if you’re under thirty. "The problem is when they still treat you like a little girl even now. You’re thirty, yet you’re still seen as the kid, or worse, 'the young lady' just because you’re female. It becomes a barrier, especially when people think they know exactly what you can offer, assuming that due to my traits, I can only write stories for women, about women."

A Cinematic Novel

The influence of Urciuolo's cinematic training is evident in her debut novel. Adorazione is a book that moves from character to character as if there were film cuts, with the camera choosing who to follow on each page. Was that a deliberate choice? "It certainly has a more cinematic structure than my second book, La verità che ci riguarda, which is due to the fact that I started writing it while I was learning so much about writing for the screen. It gave me unexpected ideas. The editing feel in the novel stems from the need to depict a community, and communities are always composed of many characters. Initially, I began writing in the first person, but then I realized the story needed multiple perspectives to convey that an event like femicide doesn’t just concern one of us, but all of us. Every girl could have been Elena, and every boy could have been Enrico, even if he never killed," she explains. A community that, as the author demonstrates, struggles to express what it feels, even – and especially – when it should confide in intimate and familiar settings. "Shame is a central theme. The small community I depicted is a reflection of the places I come from, and I still remember how people scrutinize each other and how strongly judgment is felt. Maybe it happens in bigger cities too, but they are two different approaches. I wanted to highlight how the perception of strong prejudice makes people reluctant to tell the truth, to open up, to express what they think. In Adorazione, the characters can’t talk to each other, and that’s part of the problem that leads to violent outcomes."

Returning to the Countryside

After Prisma, Adorazione also takes readers and viewers outside the Capital, into the countryside. "I’m still amazed that there are now two series set in Latina." And yet, like her protagonist, Alice Urciuolo seems to have escaped from it: "In high school, my inner drive could be summed up in one word: escape. I felt a complete sense of rejection. When I moved to Rome, the place of my escapes, I realized that what truly drove me was more the desire to escape itself rather than arriving in the Capital. Then, I don’t know what happened, but I felt the need to reunite with my hometown, Priverno, to stop hiding parts of myself and show them, affirm them, and so, I began writing about Latina. A place where we know well that political views lean towards right-wing principles, a past we’ve tried to process through some huge contradictions, like telling the story of a boy asserting his gender identity or discussing femicide in a place where the fascist party was founded, which had fixed and patriarchal ideas about women. Narratively, it was more interesting, as well as being a political choice, something essential to me."

Femicide and the Political Message of Adorazione

The show also arrives a year after the death of Elena Cecchettin and after the release of a Ministry of the Interior report showing that, since the beginning of the year, at least eighty women have died in domestic/affective contexts. "It has to be said that, many times, similar topics are handled so poorly that it would be better to just leave them alone. This comes from a kind of laziness exercised by those in power, whether political or in storytelling, basically by those in a position of dominance who don’t know how to ask the right questions or approach others properly in their work. We can’t treat gender-based violence as a private matter; we are all part of the cause," Alice insists on emphasizing.

However, there is a way to save oneself, or at least, Urciuolo has found it: "Women and books have saved my life. The tragedy of Adorazione, with themes that are also present in my second novel, is that often adults can’t give you what you need because they themselves lack it, but you can’t put all the blame on them, as they too are victims of a certain environment and are bound to have more responsibilities." One can (and should) still go to therapy, but it's undeniable that many wounds stay with us even as adults, including for those who try to heal them by writing about and exorcising them: "There are two answers when you ask if you can overcome the traumas of adolescence. The simple answer is that in life, you may face losses that seem huge at the time, but over time you realize they weren’t that significant, like first loves or people you lose touch with. Then, there are wounds that mark you when you’re too young, and you have to learn to live with them, knowing they’ll remain deep inside. Me? I have them. But I’m convinced that’s the case for everyone." Maybe that’s why, besides books and women, in her novels and series like Skam, one of the key areas of interaction for character dynamics is friendship: "I don’t want to think of friendship as relationships without internal struggles or conflicting feelings. Think of My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, where I appreciate the idea of a relationship between two people involving acceptance and growth over the years. I believe there are non-romantic relationships where I’ve allowed friends to see who I truly am, where I’ve revealed more of myself than I ever did with the men or boys I dated."

Writing According to Alice Urciuolo

And if, among the pages of Adorazione, it says that confiding in someone makes you feel special, it's impossible not to ask Alice Urciuolo if she feels the same way: "Writing books doesn’t mean being exceptional; it might have a special meaning, but only for you. The confidences that writing brings out are something else entirely, something unconscious. When you’re writing, you don’t realize how much you’re revealing about yourself, how much you’re laying yourself bare. You almost don’t have control over it, and that makes you vulnerable. Even when I read other people’s books, I feel like I’m picking up on things they might not be fully aware of." Like with Sally Rooney's Intermezzo, which has become a craze? "Yes, I really like her, but that doesn’t mean I’ll read her latest novel right away. There are very few authors whose work I feel an urge to read immediately as soon as it’s published, like with any book by Annie Ernaux."