While recounting a personal and, in many ways, exceptional story, these pages speak to something that concerns us all: it is a book about love that needs no blood ties, about our shared experience of having been, first and foremost, sons and daughters who knew the enchantment and terror of childhood, and about the strength that can spring from an alliance of bodies ready for anything to welcome a new life.

For a long time, Chiara moved through the world looking only after herself, keeping a safe distance from the idea of motherhood. Yet, at forty, triggered by a diagnosis of early menopause and a love capable of making her imagine a future, a fierce desire takes hold of her. Thus begins a painful descent into the labyrinth of fertility clinics: tests, exhausting therapies, and hopes betrayed by a body that rejects every attempt. When the possibilities of medicine in Italy seem exhausted, Chiara and her husband Nicola embark on a journey along the "underground railroad" of surrogacy. It is a path recounted with disarming frankness, stripped of all idealization—a seven-year odyssey full of unknowns and plot twists, involving the search for an agency, the choice of a donor, the specter of the pandemic, and the quest for a surrogate. The final destination is Arkansas, in the American South: a land of woods, rifles, and mythological creatures (lost mermaids in a Walmart, fawns pointing the way, Elvis emerging from jukeboxes). Here, Chiara and Nicola meet Daisy, the luminous and proud woman who will make the birth of Lula, their baby girl, possible.

Chiara Tagliaferri uses literature to traverse the pain, anger, and love that accompany this adventure, made of fears that take the shape of shadows from Twin Peaks and alliances that help find the yellow brick road from The Wizard of Oz. Written as a law—eight months after Lula’s arrival—rendered surrogacy a "universal crime" in Italy, decreeing that the desire for a child can become a criminal act, Arkansas is also an act of defiance: a story that expands the meaning of the words motherhood and family.