Pre-Order Now! From Unsolited Press, November 2025

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.

Gina Frangello, author of Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason and Elena Ferrante: The Neapolitan Novels

"Part candid memoir, part philosophical meditation, Getting Dressed in the Dark is both a daringly intimate exploration of one woman's life, love, body, and art while also grappling profoundly with how we collectively make, resist, and bend meaning in our larger cultural landscape. A book to be savored and re-read, especially now."

Amanda Gibby Peters, Founder of Simple Shui and House Therapy

“We only see through things. They show us invisible worlds.”

In a memoir as poetic as it is refreshingly unconventional, Gabriella invites us on a journey through the complexities of her life, guided by her deep connection to the homes that shaped it. With thoughtful reflection, she explores how curiosity, conversation, and candescence infuse meaning into both our spaces and our stories, even amid the upheaval of shifting places, partnerships, and identities. Through her reexamination of what truly matters, Gabriella unearths fresh roots and reveals the everyday moments as invitations to rediscover her own (as well as our) wisdom and wholeness.

Lana Wilson, Emmy-Winning Director

"In this strikingly intimate and beautifully layered memoir, Gabriella D'Italia traces the dissolution of a 20-year marriage and polyamorous relationship, unraveling the intricate connections between love, betrayal, and creative devotion. Moving fluidly through past and present, she explores how the act of making art is inseparable from the act of living—and how a life in art is shaped by the people we create with, collide with, and sometimes lose. At its heart, this is also a story of inheritance, both literal and intangible: the objects, histories, and wounds we carry forward, and the unexpected beauty that can emerge even in the darkest times. A bold, luminous meditation on what it means to forge one’s own path."

Kirsten Jacobson, Ph.D. Professor of Philosophy, University of Maine

While the story will forever be fiercely hers, Getting Dressed in the Dark opens a mirror or portal between D’Italia and her reader, inviting in all those attempting vulnerable journeys of discovery and creative birthings of their own. In each faceted chapter, D’Italia varyingly weaves or unweaves tendrils of her life’s attempts at unbound meaning making. She writes from a commitment to bearing witness to our memorial identities housed in the keepsakes, wall coverings, table scratches, sent and unsent letters, kitchen utensils, fuzzy sweaters, worn paths and meals of our lives. Her narrative is sometimes devastating, but always important: a series of blazes along a path of truth and beauty. Even for those who tend not to notice resonances of their embedment in their surrounding worlds, this memoir will spark moments of recognition of our role in weaving narratives into and through our environments. For those already sensitive to these inter weavings, the book will feel like a fortuitous lightning strike, providentially awakening new commitments within one’s own journey of creativity and living well within life’s complexities. A memoir through and through, this text simultaneously summons a chorus of those dedicated to human meaning making. D’Italia’s words and practices honor the vital importance of living life with ecstatic honesty, and she writes for those—including herself—whose voices are necessarily fragile and yet which sing potently in creative relation with other forces—people certainly, but also those of our material and spiritual surroundings, and always of our own precious embodiment. The memoir reminds us that we are always participants in crafting choruses of meaning even if at times our voices are capable only of lip syncing or, alternatively, of sobbing screams. It also reminds us that our journey here is forever unchartered in advance Pick up this book and listen. There is no way to emerge without discovering some vital tune you’ve been humming without notice beneath your many layers. It is a call for mutual recognition and the responsibility to oneself and others that lies therein.

Linda K. Mead, Visual Artist and Printmaker

“Knots became nets that told our story.”

The book winds, returns, moves away, revisits, weaves like a tapestry. It is no surprise that Gabriella is also a textile artist. What I’m reminded of over and over again while reading “Getting Dressed in the Dark” is our ability to form our lives and how, at the same time, our lives form us: our families and friends, our surroundings, the landscape, what we are inexplicably drawn to. I am reminded of the conscious and continuous commitment required to live in accordance to our beliefs. It is never smooth. We must keep coming back to what is important even when, especially when, it doesn’t make sense to others.

“And so we planned an all-salt dinner. With no water served. We had grain alcohol in large pitchers, and only tumblers to drink from, with pretzels and lemons and lemon pepper and canned soups prepared in large quantity over Sterno pots. And afterward we reclined on towels on the grown lawn and talked about ticks and scratched our elbows and backs-of-knees. And this we tried to continue as long as possible, though our guests despised us, and our host (the acquaintance whose family owned the resort) also despised us, and as our skin lost its turgor . . . with mosquitos in our ears. Guests left. Hosts left. Someone drank lake water, was ill, and left.”

An image transformed over time in a consideration of time as a material phenomenon.

Clouds over an Alpine Lake, printed with one full ink cartridge on sheets of translucent vellum. Changes in printing marked in silver ink. Over six hundred prints compiled from first to last.

Volume 1 available here

Volume 2 available here