Be Light, Not a Moth

"From the outside, my life looked perfect. But inside, nobody was home."

Italy does not forgive difference. It doesn't announce it - it presses it
into family silences, writes it across your face without a single word ever
being spoken.

Alessandro learned this early. Instead of shrinking, he left. First Tuscany,
then Brussels - where he found a love large enough to break him and a career
solid enough to hold him upright while everything else came apart. Where he
came to understand that the most dangerous homophobia is not the kind that
shouts. It is the kind that murmurs. The kind that convinces you, over years,
that there was never any place for you at all.

This is a queer Italian memoir of family trauma, devastating love, and the
work of becoming yourself. The story of a man who had to lose everything to
stop performing - and learn, at last, to be his own light.

• A father who takes years - and finally finds his way back to his son


• A love in Brussels large enough to break him, and what remained when
  it was over


• Twelve Exercises of Light - practical tools to carry this story
  into your own life


• The peace that can only be earned with the people who hurt you most


• The truth about what it costs to leave everything behind and start again

• Anyone who left their country looking for a place that would take
  all of them


• Anyone who knows what it truly costs to love too much


• Anyone still afraid to take up space

Be Light, Not a Moth is not a self-help book. It does not offer clean
answers or painless recoveries. It is a story you live inside - page by page,
exercise by exercise.

"It doesn't matter if you remember me. What matters is that I remembered
who I am."

If you have ever had to choose between belonging and becoming yourself -
this book was written for you.

Alessandro Falcinelli was born in Livorno, Italy. As a boy, he competed
nationally in inline skating - his first private language. He now lives and
works in Brussels with his dog Bimba. This is his first book.