Me, My Father and the Ants

A book about the rites of passage – growing up, high school, first love and loss, leaving home and making sense of it all.

This brief essay, originally a university commencement speech, is meant to encourage and inspire those who have their entire lives before them. It is also an intimate reflection on the privilege of education and a compassionate discourse on the objective difficulties to be overcome on the rocky road of life at such a precarious moment in history.

“An essay on identification beyond the first person experience, effort and fulfilment, meant to unsettling and inspire.”
Raffaella De Santis, Robinson – la Repubblica

“Rosella Postorino moves along the lines of David Foster Wallace.”
Loredana Lipperini, Tuttolibri – La Stampa

“Rather than superficially stating “you can make it” or the usual “you can achieve anything you want to”, Postorino sketches her challenge to destiny by emphasizing the high price to pay in a society like ours, in order to be the person you imagine you can be.”

“The existential exhilaration of someone who grew up in a house with few books and little aptitude for reading, yet found in books the discovery of new worlds, other lives, and new ways of being and thinking.”
Pierluigi Battista, Huffington Post

“A message of confidence to young people, praise for culture that makes one free and an invitation not to hide the ‘grasshopper’ part of oneself.”
Cristina Lacava, iO Donna

“This book by Rosella Postorino is a luminous little gem. Read it and let your children, your grandchildren, your pupils read it. It speaks to the present with the keys to the future.”
Viola Ardone

“With Rosella Postorino you can start discussing dreams and find yourself talking about yoga, school, religion, lockdowns and Harmony books. About the children we were and are today. A magma that simmers with teenage energy, a mix of spirit and earth that the writer has put into her new book, Io, mio padre e le formiche.”
Giulia Ziino

“A great little book. The immortal kind.”
Nadia Terranova

“In this open letter, the author gives excerpts of her first memories, discusses vulnerability, ambivalence, the contradictions of existence, and, while she urges that every obstacle should not be an insurmountable wall, she also debunks the rhetoric of  ‘making it at any price’.
Marilù Oliva, MicroMega

“A heartfelt speech to the adults of tomorrow.”
Vanity Fair

“Happiness, explains Rosella Postorino, is perhaps a right but not a duty.”
The Daily Fact

“Beautiful and exciting.”
Ritanna Armeni

“If you begin to underline sentences in this book you will end up underlining the whole thing. Rosella has written a manifesto, something indispensable to take with on the lifelong journey through books. Me, My Father and the Ants is a jewel. More than adding anything else, I would like to embrace Rosella Postorino for having decided to write it’.
Nunzio Belcaro, bookseller

“So complete and portentous are Rosella Postorino’s words in Io, mio padre e le formiche (Me, my father and the ants), that I cannot find any other books that measure up to this beauty-filled booklet. An invitation to life, to hope, to courage, to the hazards of dreams and desires’.
Giuditta Casale, Giudittalegge

Corriere della Sera