I speak Italian. I also fancy myself a writer. Imagine when a friend of mine handed me the memoir In Other Words, written in both English and Italian, and said I should read it.

Part memoir, part a romance with language, author Jhumpa Lahiri takes us on an odyssey to Florence, Italy, where she seeks to have the Italian language consume her at some cell’s depth. She even moves herself and her family to Italy.

Not long into the book, she writes, “At Tivoli I understand the nature of my Italian project. Like visitors to the villa today, like Hadrian almost two millennia ago, I walk on the surface, the accessible part. But I know, as a writer, that a language exists in the bones, in the marrow.” She longs for that, but in the end realizes it can’t be.

Lahiri structured In Other Words in both English and Italian; every other page is in one language, then switching to the other tongue. It is a mercy to read both languages in the hands of a Pulitzer-prize-winning author. Her Italian is smashing. What a surprise to discover she wrote the manuscript in English, then after years of study and living in the country, she still felt too inept to translate it herself, so had someone else do that for her.

Here’s something she made me realize: I once longed for that authentic, cellular, depth with Italian as well. It has been many years since I lived and studied in Italy, but I remember wanting to sound like a local, wanted ease with accents, vulgarisms and vernaculars. But my yearning did not compare in any way with the sort of obsession that consumed Lahiri. I was a mere dabbler.

I have returned to Italy many times since living there over fifty years ago. The language still comes to me, but in ragged and odd lurchings. Sometimes I can stumble into a phrase or a correct pronoun and can take a bit of glee in it, but the Language lies only on the surface of my skin, way distant from the depth of bone marrow Lahiri sought.

I recommend the In Other Words for anyone, no matter the language you speak. It is a wonderful read.