Never before have the family models that surround us seemed to have expanded and become more dynamic, calling into question the very principle of the “natural” family and revealing its ideological nature. Yet, on closer analysis, even behind reconstituted, extended, single-parent, and same-sex parent families, there is an alarming image of the family conceived and preserved as an inclusive and exclusive nest: a closed entity, like a sort of uterine body, which believes it contains everything its members need. Yielding to the attraction of the “claustrophilic” bond with children and its symbiotic and self-satisfying nature, the world is sucked into the family, forgetting that growth also consists of opposition, emancipation, dissonance, and negotiations with the outside world—with the Other.
 
In this sharp and provocative text, Laura Pigozzi breaks the stifling rhetoric of the inclusive family and that of a certain type of motherhood and parenthood that circulate pervasively, showing how “true filiation is having received from one's parents the possibility of leaving them” if it is true, as Hannah Arendt says, that “men are born to begin.”

«Her book is provocative and merciless: it rails against the rhetoric of the all-inclusive family, which, by sucking the world into itself, becomes not only frustrating but violent.» Paolo Di Stefano, Super moms (perhaps too much so), Corriere della Sera, 2016