Claudia Durastanti

"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.

A Novel

Strangers I Know

She was a little girl brimming with energy and hostility. 

I'll come for a visit, and she'll show me the leather gloves or the wool skirts she's spread out on the bed, and if I ask for the "brown" ones, she'll say "umber," or correct my pink with cyclamen, or distinguish periwinkle from forget-me-not; she insists it's important to use the right name for things, and all the while I'm thinking of her dead daughter, killed by color.

A deaf girl as an actress is so obvious, her whole life’s a performance 

My father and I compete at telling the most majestic lie, animated by the same arrogance of getting away with it.

His life was like a game show with knowledge broken down into simple ideas—appearing smart was easy when you rattled off data your parents were clueless about.

The vertigo of evidence that's been left behind but has no relation to me, in spite of carrying my name.

Daniela was blond, short, and curvaceous, and if not for all the black she wore, she would have been taken for a Playboy bunny.

When the sun goes down in Basilicata, the sky becomes a lung that coughs up blood and the unsettling light makes you want to cough yourself.

I came from asphalt, and in that town there was only stone.

There’s not a single act of violence in my life that I can recall without laughing. 

Strangers I Know quotes

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