Getting Dressed In The Dark
An Artist’s Way Home
A Memoir, Coming Fall 2025 From Unsolicited Press
Getting Dressed In The Dark
An Artist’s Way Home
How do you know the truth after the story you most trust disappears?
Self-betrayal, polyamory, adultery, and an unconventional life in a one-room, rural Maine schoolhouse ends in a crisis mirroring the larger, societal polarization and collapse of meaning. Compass shattered, an artist's wisdom guides a course home, revealing a hopeful image of the creative life: a way forward.
“Much of D’Italia’s work is loose on the edges to reveal that the surface is sitting on as many as 10 or more layers — which results in a sense of supremely lush substance. And still, the artist plays up the intense process-oriented content of her work through references to the medium, personal skill and the notion of the modernist grid. Adding these qualities together delivers a keen sense of time — not the regular clock of muscle-memory knitting or embroidery, but something more self aware to the point of existential obsessiveness.”
— Dan Kany for The Portland Press Herald