Veronica Raimo ; translated from the Italian by Leah Janeczko

"Already a bestseller and award-winner in Italy, Lost on Me is a burningly witty coming-of-age novel of a young woman in a wildly eccentric family from one of Italy's most celebrated young writers working today. In this distinctly contemporary, irreverent, and hilariously inverted bildungsroman, award-winning Italian author Veronica Raimo transforms neurosis, sex, and family disaster into brilliant comedy reminiscent of Fleabag and Portnoy's Complaint. Born into a family with an omnipresent mother who is devoted to her own anxiety, a father ruled by hygienic and architectural obsessions, and a precocious genius brother at the center of their attention, our heroine Vero languishes in boredom in her childhood home. Peering through tiny windows at children in the streets below while cramped in her family coven, Vero periodically attempts to strike out but is no match for her mother's relentless tracking methods and guilt-tripping mastery. Vero's every venture outside their Rome apartment ends in her being hilariously returned home. It's no wonder then that she becomes a writer-and a liar-inventing stories in a bid for her own sanity. Spiky and witty, Vero delights in her own devious schemes. As she guides us through her failed attempts at emancipation, her discovery of sex and fixations with unwitting men, and ultimately her contentious relationship with reality, she also brings alive Rome from the 1980s through the early 2000s. With restless intelligence and covert tenderness Veronica Raimo takes the traditional family novel tropes and flips them inside out. Pointed, feisty, and pulsing with a brilliant comic energy, Lost on Me takes on the uncertain enterprise of becoming a woman"--