When I set out to tell my story, I knew I wasn’t interested in writing a traditional memoir. My life has been anything but conventional—crossing continents, shifting careers, rebuilding homes and self, raising children while reimagining worlds—and the form I chose had to reflect that. Poetry felt like the most honest way to capture both the intensity and the beauty of that journey.
Poetry Makes Space for Emotion
Prose explains; poetry reveals. In poetry, a single image, a line break, or even white space can hold more truth than a paragraph of explanation. My story is layered with resilience, heartbreak, transformation, and wonder—experiences that resist being pinned down in straightforward narrative. Poetry gave me the freedom to leave space for silence, for pause, for breath. And sometimes, healing requires exactly that.
A Form That Mirrors Becoming
Life rarely unfolds in neat, linear chapters. It arrives in fragments, in flashes, in disjointed moments that only make sense when you stand back and see the tapestry as a whole. That is the nature of becoming. A memoir in poetry honors that structure: it’s stitched together by memory, sensation, and emotion, rather than by strict chronology. It allows the reader to experience the story the way I lived it—sometimes jagged, sometimes fluid, always evolving.
Accessibility Through Intensity
Paradoxically, while poetry can feel abstract, it also makes stories more accessible. A poem distills. It takes what could be pages of backstory and distills it into an essence—a heartbeat, an image, a feeling you can carry with you. That intensity invites readers not just to understand, but to feel. And when the subject is survival, loss, and renewal, feeling is where the real connection happens.
A Continuation of My Creative Life
For me, design, art, and writing are all part of the same impulse: to curate experiences that awaken beauty, reflection, and connection. Just as I restore an old palazzo in Italy with both respect for history and a vision for new life, I shaped my memoir with reverence for the fragments of memory while reimagining them into something new. Writing in poetry was an extension of that aesthetic practice—minimal yet layered, precise yet evocative.
An Invitation to the Reader
I didn’t want my book to just be read. I wanted it to be experienced. I wanted it to live in the hands of readers the way a painting or a piece of music does—resonating in their own memories, sparking their own reflections. Poetry creates that kind of space. It doesn’t dictate the experience; it opens it.
Writing my memoir in poetry wasn’t a choice I made lightly—it was the only choice that felt authentic. And as the pages came together, I realized that what I was really doing wasn’t just telling my story. I was extending a hand, saying: here are the threads of my becoming. What are yours?
