Her father, an illustrator and painter, lived in Paris from 1912 until 1915 and went back to Italy to fight in the Italian army during the First World War, as a military airplane pilot.

The sense of separateness, of being an outsider without any permanent roots contributed to d’Eramo’s deep sensitivity to the plight of “the other.” After the outbreak of World War II, her father joined the military service as a pilot and later started working for the news office of the air force.

After the fall of fascism, on July 25, 1943, Luce followed her family to Bassano del Grappa in northern Italy, where her father was nominated to be the undersecretary of the air force in the Republic of Salò (a puppet state led by Mussolini and supported by Nazi Germany and Italian fascist loyalists).

The brutal awakening to the cruel reality of oppression and exploitation carried on in the camps pushed her to take an active part in the resistance against the Nazis.

After the war ended, Luce returned to Italy and spent some time in Bologna as a patient in the Rizzoli Clinic where she met Pacifico d’Eramo, a survivor of the Russian campaign recovering from sustained injuries.

In Finché la testa vive (1963), a short novel also later included in Deviazione, she confronted the trauma of being confined to a wheelchair at the age of nineteen.

In the years of the so-called “strategy of tension,” d’Eramo’s friend, Camilla Cederna (a Milanese journalist) brought to her attention the case of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, the famous publisher who, according to the official version and the police, was blown up while placing an explosive under a high-voltage pole.

During the entirety of her career as a writer, d’Eramo also collaborated with a variety of magazines (Nuovi Argomenti, La Fiera Letteraria, Studi Cattolici, Nuova Antologia, Tempo Presente) and newspapers (Il manifesto, L’Unità and Avvenire).

D’Eramo’s writings have always gravitated toward uneasy or controversial subjects, in search of solutions that would liberate people from thousands of physical and mental constraints.

This pursuit would lead them toward a better knowledge of the self and an acceptance of the unknown and of “the other,” abolishing barriers that divide and exclude, thus allowing for a congenial coexistence on our planet, a tiny speck in the universe.

After addressing the issues of Nazism and World War II in Deviazione and in short stories (collected in 1999 under the title Racconti quasi di guerra), Luce d’Eramo has confronted a variety of hard situations, involving social and psychological problems: the fight of dissident communist groups during the period of terror and “urban guerrilla” in Italy, called “the years of lead,” in the novel Nucleo Zero (1981); the plight of the elderly in Ultima luna (1993); the emotional deafness of young nazi skinheads in Si prega di non disturbare (1995); the mental illness in Una strana fortuna (1997); and finally, in Un’estate difficile, the psychological portrait of a domineering husband and a wife who fights for autonomy and faces the break-up of her marriage, despite the rigid social and cultural conditions existing in Italy in the fifties.

D’Eramo’s passionate interest in them stems from her own sense of “alienation,” as she revealed in her last book-interview Io sono un’aliena, published in 1999, two years before her death.

Excerpts from Una strana fortuna (A Strange Fate) were translated into English and appeared in the anthology Resisting Bodies, Narratives of Italian Women Partisans (2008).