«We are born every day, every time we find another piece of us, every time we discover ourselves different.». We come into the world blind. In the sense of unaware: exposed to a bombardment of experiences, unaware of who we are, uncertain of the blurred boundaries between the self and the world. Moving from perception to knowledge is a lifelong endeavor. And this is how we are born many times: perhaps with the discovery of sex, or with the first great pain, the first injustice. Birth can also be a death, and vice versa. What is this moment, how does it occur, at what cost? Eleven leading authors from the new Italian literary scene take on the task of narrating this turning point. Tales like gems that give us back a sense of the uniqueness of life experiences in the multiplicity of destinies, and illuminate a truth: perhaps this instant of epiphany has never been as significant and intense as it is today, for generations who are experiencing it earlier and earlier and who know how to recognize it with singular maturity. Teresa Ciabatti writes: «One never finishes being born, say the eleven writers, very different from each other, yet united by the generation. Being part of the generation that grew up alone, the mother boys as Achille Lauro calls them. Raised without adults as parents worked, and grandparents were not there (far away, dead). Here they are free children with the world at their fingertips - be it even a television or a computer through which to imagine».

A roundup of unorthodox interventions, full of intelligence and critical sense, an essential vademecum for anyone interested in the topic. A discussion that gives us excellent tools to "stop thinking that demographic winter is a moral or economic issue: it is, instead, a matter of perspective, imposing new lenses; it is a matter of political geography and reorganization of the world according to new criteria."
Demographic winter: and before us lie barren, frozen plains to put Game of Thrones to shame, echoes of Shakespearean tragedies resound in the mind. No more children are being made in Italy, where will our civilization go, but most importantly: who will pay our pensions? But what is the point of insisting that the only way to keep the system going is to procreate, even where women - to be precise, a minority of women quantified by ISTAT as 5 percent - despite being in a position to have children, do not want them? With respect to the issue of motherhood, schematism often win out and women find themselves represented either as victims of a country in which having children is a privilege - the precariousness of work, low wages, inaccessible kindergartens, the welfare state that does not provide as it should - or as a handful of cynical, superficial, careerists and future repentants destined for a lonely old age embittered by the regret of not having reproduced. Between these two poles there are the real people, to whom the interventions collected in this book give voice. Many women, but also some men, who have taken up the challenge launched by Simonetta Sciandivasci with lucidity and irony in the pages of "Mirror," a cultural insert of "La Stampa," a challenge to question why one becomes a parent or not, to reason about the different possible physiognomies of a family.