Michela Murgia’s confession: “I have a few months left, now I’m getting married and I’m not afraid of death”
An operation today “nit wouldn’t make sense. The metastases are already in the lungs, bones, brain.” Michela Murgia talks about her illness in a long interview with Corriere della Sera with Aldo Cazzullo. “I have months left. I’m getting married because the state is asking for a role: my husband will know what to do. Scatter my ashes in the ocean in Korea. I hope I don’t die as long as Meloni is prime minister, I don’t want to die with a fascist government“, Murgia says.
The writer recounts that she has stage four renal cell carcinoma. She is being treated “with an immunotherapy based on biopharmaceuticals. She does not attack the disease: it stimulates the response of the immune system”. She then explains that she had already had cancer: “In a lung. Cough. I checked. It was in a very early state. We recognized it immediately. It was a blow to the ass”. She also tells that during the purchase of the new house she was denied a mortgage because she was ill.
Murgia says to Aldo Cazzullo: “The metastases are already in the lungs, the bones, the brain.” He then says that after turning 50 she decided to “let go of what is not vital: this is one of the most important things that I have understood in these months of treatment for the disease and holy hygiene of life and relationships. So for my fiftieth birthday I opened the wardrobe, which was exploding with things accumulated over the years, and I chose fifty garments that throughout my life have dressed the person I have been, but who I am no longer now”.
More on the disease: “Cancer is not something I have; it’s something I am. The doctor who follows me explained it well, a genius. Single-celled organisms have no neoplasms; but they don’t write novels, they don’t learn languages, they don’t study Korean. Cancer is an accomplice to my complexity, not an enemy to be destroyed. I can’t and I don’t want to make war on my body, on myself. Cancer is one of the prices you can pay to be special. I would never call him the cursed one, or the alien.”
On his passion for Korea, he explains that he has been studying Korean for two years: “I also wanted to go to Korea, but my conditions don’t allow it at the moment. It all stems from a passion for k-pop and for Bts, a music and a group that give me great joy. I started studying Korean to understand the lyrics. Then I realized that the real reason was another. “Jhumpa Lahiri explained it to me. Postcolonial writers, who have succeeded not in their native language but in the dominant language of the colonizer, tend to seek a third space, a third homeland. For Jhumpa, who has Indian origins and writes in English, it is Italy. For me, who am Sardinian and write in Italian, it is Korea. Maybe I’ll go when they scatter my ashes in the ocean in Busan. In Korean, I look for words that no one has ever used against me, and that I have never used against anyone.”
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