Elena Vella

Elena Vella is a licensed relationship and family therapist with a private clinic in Malta and a court-appointed mediator in family and divorce proceedings. She is also the most honest writer about love you will find in any language. These things are related. She grew up in Malta, emigrated to Australia at twenty-two with her family, worked bars and restaurant floors in Sydney while studying psychology, and married Daniel — a university love, warm and earnest and ultimately not enough. She finished her degree, worked as a therapist, and came back to Malta when a senior clinical position offered more than Sydney could. She returned also because something in her had always remained in the nanna's house in Żebbuġ — a house of character with thick walls and a courtyard that smells of jasmine in May, left by her nanna and nannu — waiting for her to come home. She has been married three times. She says this without apology. The second was Robert — George Clooney's face, a narcissist's soul. She loved him more than was rational. She lost a pregnancy during that marriage. She left anyway. Two years later he was gone — Dingli, they said. She found out from a mutual friend. She does not go to Dingli. She does not explain why. Those who know her well enough do not ask. The third was Antonio, an Italian fashion designer with olive groves in Sicily and the face of someone who understood he was being watched. She found him in the grove cottage with someone else. She left the same day. These experiences did not make her cynical. They made her precise.