Irene Perali
Followives
What happens when you follow love… and lose yourself?
Five women leave Milan for Silicon Valley, believing they are stepping into opportunity. Instead, they find suspended identities, stalled careers, cultural dissonance, and the invisible negotiations behind modern love.
Followives is a contemporary novel about ambition, immigration, motherhood, friendship, and the quiet compromises that reshape a life.
Set between Italy and California’s tech world, it explores what it means to rebuild yourself in a language that is not your own — and to ask, at some point: Who am I, outside of the role I chose?
Behind the book
I wrote Followives after moving to California and experiencing the disorientation of living between two languages and two identities.
As a tech professional in Silicon Valley, I met many brilliant women who had relocated for love or partnership. On paper, they were living the dream. In private, many were renegotiating ambition, belonging, career, and self-worth.
This novel was born from those conversations.
You may notice that the English carries the voice of someone who learned it as an adult. That is intentional. For this edition, I chose not to smooth out every imperfection. The characters live in linguistic in-between spaces — and so does the language.
From Followives
"Your hobbies have always been more important than mine."
"Do you mean that my job has always been less important than yours?"