. Fourteen year old Italian girl, Chamed, is a living miracle after fighting illness since birth to live a normal life. Now fourteen years old, she feels a thrill of freedom when she convinces her parents to let her stay home alone while they go on holiday. She soon regrets that decision when she receives a call from her aunt Patrizia that the worst has happened: her parents have died in a car accident.
Things only get worse for Chamed as she mourns the deaths of her parents and suffers under the care of her aunt and uncle. Her aunt repeatedly abuses her and convinces others that she is an evil child. When Chamed’s best friend’s father sexually harasses her, the blame is placed on Chamed. Deeply depressed, she attempts suicide, only to find herself waking up in a mental hospital. Her nightmare is only beginning as she is subjected to electroshock therapy against her will – and worse from the nurses and doctors.
Finally she finds hope again in Dr. Franco, but will he be enough to save her from this living nightmare?
Life’s Ways to Make Us Walk by Chamed
Life has many ways to make us walk. Writing for me has been essentially diving in the treacherous waters of my past. Although it’s very painful to remember my past, sometimes for me it’s the only way to get better and to go on.
My mother used to tell me that life is a steep stairway full of suffering. Life puts us in a position to overcome the obstacles, but there is pain that is unnatural. The relationship with my parents was very important because I lived it with a lot of conscience, in the bad times of illness and in its profound unease.
Then a dark violence disrupted my peace. It soon turned into a nightmare, a seemingly never ending nightmare. Love, hostility, death. Anger, terror, and insanity. Errors and horrors of a psychiatry that raped my mind.
Many people have entered my life. Over the years, each one mattered very much to me, each one left his or her mark. It is difficult to forget the people that I loved and that I hated, with whom I lived the beautiful and awful crossroads of my life. The doctors that had cured my childhood illness and helped me through my illness, my schoolmates - who by the way didn’t have respect for me and insulted me - the nun that humiliated me in front of my schoolmates.
And I will never forget my mom’s last hug, with her smile and her dimples, and my father’s last hug, as if he wanted to let me have his soul, his force, to help me in climbing the steep stairway of my life.
There is a book trailer, it features paintings that are my own: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYhOBmDJkdU
Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/My-Heart-Stopped-Beating/231869093494435
Chamed is not the registry office name of the author, yet it is not a pseudonym. She lives in Tuscany, she works mostly abroad, as a painter on canvas and porcelain. Some of her porcelain works are displayed in exhibitions in Italy, Sweden and Poland, France, Portugal and Brazil. My Heart Stopped Beating is her first novel. A second novel by her is forthcoming.
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