Agnese was thirteen when she found out her father had once been a priest. She discovered it by chance, in the back of a drawer: a small red photo album labeled “don Pini,” filled with pictures of a young man in priest’s robes, staring off with a solemn gaze. That day marked the end of her childhood— and the start of a life shaped by a searing secret, a truth too heavy to grasp. Twenty-six years later, The Truth Is a Fire gives voice to the love and distance, the wonder and ache, that define a bond between father and daughter. What led don Pini to leave the priesthood for a young woman named Mira? What price did he pay to become a husband and father—and what did it mean, for decades, to live with a love forbidden, unspoken, and carefully hidden? Structured as a dialogue with a psychoanalyst—Dr. F.—this memoir blends intimate confession and intellectual investigation. The therapy becomes more than a narrative frame: it’s a space for unearthing buried memories, confronting ghosts of the past, and asking the essential question behind all self-inquiry: Who am I, now that my certainties have cracked? The voice of the narrator is steady yet lyrical, deeply personal yet universal. The writing mirrors the rhythm of analysis: circling back, probing deeper, finding sudden clarity. Against the backdrop of a small provincial town in the Italian Apennines—a place where time stands still and judgment speaks loudest—Pini retraces the fragile path from daughter to woman, from silence to selfhood. The Truth Is a Fire is not only the story of a daughter confronting her father's past— it is also the reckoning of a woman with her own. A moving meditation on identity, guilt, legacy, and the quiet, blazing force of truth. 

On Chora Media, you can listen to an interview with the author about the book on the program “Voce ai Libri” (Voice to Books).