Enrico Brizzi
Jack Frusciante è uscito dal gruppo

The first time I read "Jack Frusciante è uscito dal gruppo" I was about 16 years old and my whole world revolved around black hair and the hazel eyes of a high school classmate.

In those days I sincerely believe I sublimated the concept of "Love," to the point of bringing it to an ideal halfway point between a painful priapism and the ecstatic veneration that can be inspired by the appearance of a celestial emissary.

Because She was "my Adelaide". "More than a girl, an entire Battisti record".

In that book, the debut of a slightly over twenty-year-old Enrico Brizzi, I found everything I had and everything I would have wanted to have:

...endless escapes on piano and demuffled Garelli, love letters so beautiful I would never write again, devastating and enigmatic phrases as blunt as a kick in the balls given from behind ["You are TOO IMPORTANT for me" (?)", "Right now I DON'T FEEL LIKE being your girlfriend" (??) "The idea of a TOO EXCLUSIVE relationship SCARES me" (???...BITCH...)]. Super drunken evenings "that you end up sleeping over at mine", intestines twisted from the Monday test after a weekend spent fooling around, "Screw the teachers!", any music is fine as long as it's noise, Dante, the three volumes of "History of Philosophy from the origins to today," "The Little Prince," and the super bore of "taming each other", which - to be honest - always seemed like a colossal crap to me, but I never told anyone...

I recently reread "Jack Frusciante è uscito dal gruppo" by chance, because it ended up in my hands while tidying my new Ikea bookshelf (...). In some ways, I found it still "alive"... "sincere"... devoid of the embarrassing artificiality that soils so much of today's youth literature, written by forty-something-year-olds horny for frightened, yet somewhat excited, twelve-year-olds, at the thought of the first menstrual cycle and the second blowjob performed in the boys' bathroom.

Yet...

Yet I noticed many naiveties, many forced elements, an adolescent epic that, at the time, seemed super cool to me and now seemed almost caricatured. Of endless and pretextual digressions-reflections on faith, society, and the meaning of life. Too many quotes (Burgessian and not) so redundant and so insistent as to be cloying.

Perhaps it's because, in the meantime, I've "grown up" (...). Or maybe it's just that since then, I've read many more books, been with (NOT) many more girls and gotten screwed over many more times. ...which, in the end, is the same thing, right?

Today, Adelaide, who was once "mine," and I are good acquaintances. We hardly ever speak, but if we meet on the street we exchange a cheek kiss and ask each other with a smile how work is going and "So when are you getting married?"
I stopped "desiring her with such anger that it hurt me" many years ago.
I stopped being jealous of her for less time than one might think.