'It's Not My Fault' (Non è colpa mia) by Vanna Ugolini and Lucia Magionami

Review By Cecilia Sandroni

Wretched is the snow. Wretched is the friend. Wretched is the brake pedal that slipped, wretched is the destiny that didn’t stop that hand.

“Non è colpa mia” (it’s not my fault) is written with four hands by the journalist Vanna Ugolini and psychologist Lucia Magionami. It deals with a series of unfortunate coincidences that led to the death of women at the hands of their men, those men who promised to love them and share with them a life project.

The murderers of women, interviewed in the book, after a three year process, a final judgment and years of jail in front of them, are still reluctant to admit their responsibilities in the killing of their wives. They try to find excuses, justify their actions and downsize their responsibility. Though it is their fault, the responsibility of what happened is on them.

But this is not the only outcome that emerges from the book. These interviews play a really important role in helping us understand what leads to a feminicide within a violent relationship. They lend a hand to us in understanding how a family man changes and evolves, one day after the other, to a man being able to kill.

We are not dealing with ill people, hit by a fit of rage. We are dealing with normal men that didn’t accept the decision of autonomy of their partners, men that don’t know how to call these new emotions they try to stop, a path that would lead to a break up with a violent action.

While the first part of the book represents an emotional and evocative narration of Luca’s, Giacomo’s and Luigi’s story, in the second part the psychologist and psychotherapist Lucia Magionami gives a scientific key of lecture to the many questions that we have on violent relationships and on the mechanisms that allow these events to seem complicated to whoever sees them from the outside and that will hopefully at the same time help women who are living them.

“Non è colpa mia” (it’s not my fault) can be purchased here

International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, 25 November

Un grazie speciale alla rivista TUCK MAGAZINE - Online political, human rights and arts magazine, 

a Val Micheal Tuck e 

a Cecilia Sandroni.