Strangers I Know

„Durastanti casts the universal drama of the family as the sieve through which the self–woman, artist, daughter–is filtered and known.“ –Ocean Vuong

A work of fiction about being a stranger in your own family and life.

Every family has its own mythology, but in this family none of the myths match up. Claudia’s mother says she met her husband when she stopped him from jumping off a bridge. Her father says it happened when he saved her from an attempted robbery. Both parents are deaf but couldn’t be more different; they can’t even agree on how they met, much less who needed saving.

Into this unlikely yet somehow inevitable union, our narrator is born. She comes of age with her brother in this strange, and increasingly estranged, household split between a small village in southern Italy and New York City. Without even sign language in common – their parents have not bothered to teach them – family communications are chaotic and rife with misinterpretations, by turns hilarious and devastating. An outsider in every way, she longs for a freedom she’s not even sure exists. Only books and punk rock–and a tumultuous relationship–begin to show her the way to create her own mythology, to construct her own version of the story of her life.

Kinetic, formally dazzling, and spectacularly original, this book is a funny and profound portrait of an unconventional family that makes us look anew at how language shapes our understanding of ourselves.

Editorial Reviews

10/25/2021

Durastanti’s insightful and complex English-language debt examines a family’s lifelong communication issues as its unnamed protagonist, an author and translator and 30-something daughter of two deaf Italian parents, explores the mysteries and myths of her life story. Her parents disagree on how they met, and divorce when the narrator is a young girl, causing her to split her childhood between Brooklyn, with her mother, and southern Italy, with her father. They don’t teach her sign language, which makes communicating with them confusing or impossible, and her parents are often unstable („It’s easier to say my parents are deaf, more complicated to say they’re mentally ill“). As a teen wandering down St. Marks Place, she discovers punk, prompting her to discard her „conformist magazines“ and fall in love with the city’s smell of „candy and garbage.“ In college, she aches for guidance but struggles with intimacy, convinced that „estrangement“ and poor communication are normal in a relationship, while real love is a myth. The narrator also addresses her feelings on being an outsider as an immigrant, and not knowing which social class she fits into in the U.S. While some of the narrative can feel jumbled, Durastanti offers profound insights and can capture moments of beauty. This makes for an enjoyable and distinctive bildungsroman. Agent: Sandra Pareja, Massie & McQuilkin. (Jan.)
– Publishers Weekly

2021-10-27
The daughter of two deaf parents explores her identity in a shape-shifting work straddling the boundaries of genre.

Durastanti, a noted Italian writer born in Brooklyn, formulates her first novel as a series of autobiographical and philosophical vignettes organized by theme: Family, Travels, Health, Work & Money, Love, and What’s Your Sign. The often whimsical subheadings include „The Girl Absent for Dizzy Spells“ and „The Love That Would Not End for Another Eighteen Years, If It Ever Did, Began.“ While the beginning of the book focuses on her parents’ origins and the final sections on her own experience of couple-hood as an adult, the book is resolutely nonlinear; the author confides in an afterword that she would have loved to have every copy printed with a different chapter sequence. „But is it a true story?“ is a question first posed by the narrator’s mother, who „hates fiction“ and „believes The Exorcistis a realist masterpiece,“ and it returns repeatedly right up until the last sentence of the book. Who can say? „It takes only a little misstep to slip out of a novel, to fall into an autobiography and resurface again as an essay, all in the short span of a sentence.“ The author’s parents are romantic characters given to extremes–they met the day her father tried to jump off the Sisto Bridge in Trastevere, or possibly the day he saved her mother from two thieves who were kicking her and trying to yank away her purse. Growing up in a chaotic, confusing family between Brooklyn and rural southern Italy, the author and her older brother, who were never taught sign language, bonded intensely. „When I’m asked who taught me to speak properly…I realize the first language I spoke was that of the first person I loved: the Italian of a boy six years my senior.“ Further guideposts and socialization were provided by literature, cinema, and music: Last Exit to Brooklynwas „the book that changed everything…revealing all my insides,“ while in her adolescence, R.E.M’s Automatic For the Peoplewas an alternative to a social life: „For some reason, sinking into a dimension of held-in breath, potential euthanasia, and men on the moon was comforting.“

Fans of Jenny Offill and Rachel Cusk will enjoy this unusual work of personal mythology.
– Kirkus Reviews

Praise for Strangers I Know

„Strangers I Know lies at the intersection of memoir, literary criticism, and bildungsroman,
bleeding fiction into fact in order to explore the mythologies that have shaped Durastanti’s life and sensibility…symphonic.“ –Paris Review

„Part documentary, part fiction, part literary criticism…a coming of age story spiked with the same brand of vitriol that springs up from works like Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.“ –The Observer

„The language in Strangers I Know, wonderfully translated by Elizabeth Harris, is precise…
For Durastanti, language has the power to perform an excavation of the self in the attempt to bring the inexpressible into understanding.“ –Ploughshares

„Formally innovative and emotionally complex, this novel explores themes of communication, family, and belonging with exceptional insight. Durastanti, celebrated in Italy for her intelligent voice and her hybrid perspective, speaks to all who are outside and in-between. Strangers I Know, in a bracing translation by Elizabeth Harris, is a stunning English-language debut.“
–Jhumpa Lahiri

„Playful, looping, atmospheric and funny, Strangers I Know is a singular achievement, one of those rare books that expanded my understanding of what a novel can do. Claudia Durastanti is an absolutely thrilling writer.
–Lauren Groff, author of Matrix and Fates and Furies

„Brave and deeply felt… Here the novel is not only a medium of illumination, but also a buoy cast into the dark waters of memory, imagination, and boldly embodied questions. In other words, it is my favorite kind of writing, the kind that not only tells of the world–but burrows through it, alive.“
–Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

„A fiercely inventive, lyrical journey into the heart, and into the cultures of America, Italy, and England. Durastanti’s singular voice and the intensity of her honesty stayed with me. I’ve never read or heard anything like this book.“
–Krys Lee, author of Drifting House and How I Became a North Korean

„Claudia Durastanti’s writing is lyrical and sharp, underpinned with a searching gaze that turns the everyday into something darkly beautiful. Every page feels totally, absorbingly, alive.“
–Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure

„The story of an upbringing full of obstacles. Like a Dickens character, Claudia goes from one mishap to the next, always keeping her curiosity of the world and her capacity to feed deep affections.“ –Rai Cultura

„Halfway between Natalia Ginzburg and Joan Didion, Durastanti’s [Strangers I Know] is her Family Lexicon.“ –L’Independente
– From the Publisher