“I have never been honest with myself,” Starnone’s narrator begins. “I can’t accept even the most basic truths.” This is a situation every fiction writer, as well as many people who have never written a single line, will find relatable: telling lies (stories) is compulsive; it starts as a replacement for real life and then it becomes your life. The defining moment in the narrator’s relationship with truth is a short story by Hemingway. The version of “Cat in the Rain” he read as a child had a majolica cat in it, but then things turned out to be different. He was left convinced that what you invent is more truthful than what you stumble across in so-called reality. “[W]hat are facts, if not an endless series of majolica cats?”

Originally published in Italian in L’umanità è un tirocinio, Einaudi, 2023. Published in translation in The New Yorker, April 2025, and available to subscribers to read here