Life is cruel, Ana Maria

In this moving account, Fábio de Melo reconstructs his relationship with his mother, Ana Maria. In heartbreaking and sincere prose, he reveals his deepest feelings in conversations about spirituality, religion, permanence, faith, and love, as well as about life and its legacy.

“After my mother dies, my obligation to be happy also dies.” - Fábio de Melo

With profound sensitivity and lyricism, Ana Maria presents the reader with a frank account of the deconstruction of her mother as an idealized model and of the grief not only of the human and material loss, but also of this idealization itself. By reconstructing, through an imaginary dialogue, his mother's journey of humility and deprivation and reflecting on how this shaped not only her worldview but also his own, Fábio de Melo, more as a son than as a priest, reveals with raw emotion his impressions of faith and love, resentment and pain, the joys and cruelties of life. It is a powerful and moving reflection on the passage of time and finitude, a work capable of touching and sensitizing everyone.

“Forget what you already know about her, what you already understood about her.

Look at your lady as if you were absorbed in the details of a Caravaggio painting. Read her lines as if you were reading a detailed description by Marcel Proust.

Do like the character who set out in search of lost time. Dip the madeleine in the café au lait and travel the paths that reminiscence suggests.

Then return, embrace the memory already forgiven, allow yourself the tears that wash away the past in the waters of the present. And, now in perfect agreement with the pains that cloud the blades of your eyes, see how beautiful your mother is.”