Six children, five families, a teacher and a first-grade class at a Roman school. These are the elements Chiara Gamberale brings together in her latest novel, Liberi tutti (Feltrinelli). It is a story as complex as relationships between individuals — and between parents and children — can be. A kaleidoscope of humanity that explores the masks we wear and the chains we carry, until a violent event finally breaks them.

Gamberale will present the novel on Saturday at 6 p.m. in the Foyer of Turin’s Teatro Regio as part of the Portici di Carta Book Fair.

How did the idea for the novel come about?

“It’s an ensemble novel, with a thriller element that had never appeared in anything I’d written before. The protagonists are five families, five couples. Everyone is under scrutiny, both the parents and the children.

“The idea came to me when I started spending time again with my almost 9-year-old daughter, at school pickup. I discovered an enormous potential for storytelling there.”

What kind of potential?

“I immediately began seeing what lay behind these families. Parents and children have to say goodbye quickly, and you notice dynamics that I couldn’t help being interested in. You may work with someone for years without ever seeing their parents. But at school pickup, you see them.”

“At one point in the novel I say: ‘Only in a hospital and at school pickup do you run the risk of being this real.’ There’s no time to put on a mask. You see the couples and their relationship with their children.”

“The novel contains five love stories from this small world, all marked by guilt, manipulation and lies. And you see all of it at school pickup. It’s a wonderful and frightening stage.”

What have you come to understand about childhood?

“The protagonist isn’t just the childhood of the students, but also the childhood of their parents. The real challenge is to ask whether it is ever too late to have a happy childhood.”

“To make peace with that part of ourselves, which I explored long before becoming a mother. I’ve always been drawn to it, but it has frightened me, too. When I meet someone, I ask myself: ‘What kind of child was this person?’

“I remain convinced that childhood is where we form — and deform — the people we will become. And where the damage we will suffer, and the damage we will inflict on others, begins.”

What kind of language is ‘child-speak’?

“I believe that today, more than ever, if we want to understand children and young people, we must put ourselves at their level and find a language of empathy. That is what ‘child-speak’ is.

“It’s not just a language for understanding children or talking to them. It’s a language that allows us to do without the masks we wear. It’s also the language of people in love — the language that allows you to understand another person without analyzing, through empathy.”

When parents open up, does the way children see things change?

“I’m convinced it does. Whenever there is a child or teenager expressing distress, they are always crying out on behalf of the entire family. If the family listens and changes, the child gets better.”

You use the image of ‘blending into the air.’ What does it mean?

“In this novel there is guilt, there are lies and truths, and death could not be absent. Ultimately, the book argues that a family is free if it can face any issue.”

“It’s ambiguity that destroys families, not complexity. Complexity can be discussed and explained, even to a child. Ambiguity, on the other hand, destroys a child.”

“‘Blending into the air’ is how the narrator — the teacher, who listens to everyone — tells the story of death.”

So does Liberi tutti mean freeing ourselves from pretense and hypocrisy?

“And from masks, layers of conditioning, things left unsaid, inherited fears and other people’s expectations. It’s the only way to try to understand who we are and what we want.”