The Kintsugi Poet: A Memoir - Blood Memory, Secrets, and Identity

The Kintsugi Poet: A Memoir - Blood Memory, Secrets, and IdentityMirella Di Benedetto writing as Anna VerduciIn this searing and formally ambitious memoir, Mirella Di Benedetto - writing under the name Anna Verduci - recounts a life fractured by institutional silence, familial secrecy, and cultural shame. The Kintsugi Poet is a deeply introspective narrative of adoption, identity, trauma, and the relentless search for truth in the face of systemic erasure.Born into concealment and raised under a false name in 1970s Australia, the author undertakes a decades-long journey of reconstruction - legal, genetic, emotional. What begins as a private investigation gradually becomes a philosophical excavation of family, loss, and the inheritance of silence. Crossing from Melbourne to New York to Calabria, she confronts bureaucracies, bloodlines, and the ghosts of parents who never truly arrived.Structured as a mosaic of fragments - memory shards, state documents, half-truths, and recovered voices - the memoir resists traditional narrative arcs in favour of emotional and structural integrity. It is a work of literary memoir in the highest sense: formally precise, thematically layered, and ethically uncompromising.The title draws from the Japanese art of kintsugi, in which broken pottery is mended with gold. Rather than conceal the fractures, Di Benedetto honours them - rendering a life not as a wound, but as a vessel made luminous through reassembly.Written in lyrical, unflinching prose, The Kintsugi Poet will resonate with readers of Annie Ernaux, Deborah Levy, Christos Tsiolkas, and Carmen Maria Machado.The author's background as a psychologist informs the memoir's depth, offering insight into the emotional logic of trauma, attachment, and reparation.This memoir is not about finding a family. It is about becoming a self.