Confidence Interval
In the interval of life, hope lies between silence and song.
a novella in progress developed in our Cinema Therapy program
Confidence Interval traces the late-life odyssey of Vincent, a retired statistician and grieving widower whose world has been fractured by Parkinson’s disease and the loss of his beloved wife, Sophia. Leaving behind his silent Washington, D.C. condo, he returns to Northern California to settle the family’s historic orchard and farmhouse—a place steeped in silence, harsh judgments, and generational trauma.
​
What begins as a reluctant homecoming becomes a reckoning. Vincent must navigate the warring claims of his niece Kathy and his estranged nephew Johnny, who has aligned with developers intent on bulldozing the land. With the support of Kathy, her children, and Miguel—a wry carpenter with Parkinson’s of his own—Vincent finds unexpected allies.
Music, memory, and courtroom battles test his resolve. In the end, Vincent learns that resilience lies not in certainty, but in embracing life’s “confidence interval”: the fragile space between loss and renewal, silence and song.
Author: Darryl Bertolucci
Living with Parkinson’s, I know what it means to have your body betray you, to feel life narrowing. Yet shakiness becomes more than a symptom—it becomes the rhythm of my life. It is rhythm like a film score underscoring a fragile hero embarking on the Hero’s Journey into the unknown. We all face fears, loneliness, feelings we can’t express. We all live inside uncertainty—between collapse and resilience, within life’s confidence interval.
​
Three of my long-time loves—film, improv, and music—have become lifelines. Cinema Therapy showed me that movies are not just escape but companions, mirrors that help us name what we cannot say aloud. I learned how a single scene can unlock hidden grief, how shared laughter or tears remind us that healing is possible. Improv teaches me to trust the unscripted moment. Music carries me still—Paul Simon, Jim Croce, The Eagles, the soundtrack of Les Misérables, and many more. Film, improv, and music remind me I don’t walk this road alone, and setting them down on the page is how I carry them forward.
​
This book is my offering. To anyone facing Parkinson’s, grief, or silence too heavy to bear: the tremor doesn’t get the last word. Connection does.
