My Story...
I’m an Italian-born storyteller living in the south of England with my husband, our three children, and a dog who is firmly convinced he runs the house. Don’t let him know, but I’m afraid he may be right.
I trained and worked as a psychologist, and that part of me never really went away. It became part of the way I read the world, and part of the way I tell stories. What has always fascinated me most is the power of metaphor: the way a story can hold emotional truth, reveal what lies beneath the surface, and help us see ourselves more clearly. Even when my fiction begins with fantasy, adventure, or an impossible idea, there is usually a deeper symbolic thread running underneath. I’m drawn to stories that do more than entertain, stories that resonate, that offer recognition, and that leave space for change.
Since childhood, I’ve carried stories in my head. They were fantastical, improbable, full of escape routes and other lives I could step into whenever the real world felt too narrow. I was always building worlds, chasing wonder, and looking for what lay just beyond the edge of the ordinary. That imaginative impulse never left me. It stayed quietly with me for years, long before I knew what shape it would eventually take.
My path to writing, however, was anything but straightforward. At school, I was never the one people would have pointed to as “the literary one.” In those years, it often felt as if books and writing belonged to those who moved through words with ease, and I didn’t feel I was one of them. And yet I read constantly, even when reading asked far more of me than it seemed to ask of others. For a long time, I never imagined I might one day write stories of my own. It was only later, in my twenties, that I discovered I was dyslexic and began to understand that what I had taken for a lack of ability was, in fact, a different kind of struggle.
It was only when I reached my mid-forties that I finally admitted to my therapist that my imagination had become impossible to ignore. (Yes, if you’re wondering, psychologists do see psychologists.) Together, we began to look at the patterns, symbols, and structures inside the stories I carried in my mind, almost as if they were dreams waiting to be understood. One day she told me, “Sooner or later, you’ll find a story you truly need to write.” A few months later, I began shaping the first foundations of 17 Planets.
I grew up in the 1970s and 80s, in a world where dyslexia was barely recognised, and ADHD even less so. At school, I was often seen as bright but lazy and distractible. I knew I wasn’t lazy, but I had no language for the difficulties I was struggling with. So I drew the only conclusion I could: that I simply wasn’t clever enough. What teachers read as carelessness or lack of effort was often the result of struggles I had no name for.
Difficulties with concentration, organisation, and focus were treated as unwillingness, as though I could have done everything easily if only I had tried hard enough. What made it stranger was that I loved books. Reading was never easy for me, but it was essential. It was how I escaped, imagined, and lived other lives.
I only discovered I was dyslexic in my twenties, and much later I came to understand how much ADHD had also shaped the way I moved through the world: the distraction, the difficulty of organising time and attention, the constant sense of having to fight my own mind just to keep pace with ordinary things.
If you asked me now, I would say yes, of course I would have wanted to understand sooner. I would have wanted help, language, and the right tools for difficulties that, for far too long, made me believe I was incapable, inadequate, or simply not clever enough. I would certainly have wanted an easier path. But I also know that those struggles shaped the inner strategies, resilience, and ways of seeing that became part of my strength. They placed obstacles in my way, but they also helped make me who I am.
For a long time, I never believed I could write. And yet, when I finally began, the words often came with a force that felt almost automatic, as though imagination had been waiting all along for its own way through.
Ted Hughes’s The Thought-Fox has always felt like the perfect description of that process:
“The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
the page is printed.”