MELISSA PANARELLO
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By LENORA TODARO
100 STROKES OF THE BRUSH BEFORE BED
By Melissa P.
Translated by Lawrence Venuti.
167 pp. Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic. Paper, $12.
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MELISSA P. has been a naughty little girl. She begged a boorish boy with strawberry-tasting lips to take her virginity; on her sweet 16th she allowed an ''arrogant angel'' and his four devil friends to enter her ''Secret''; she played Lolita to her math tutor and dominatrix to a bad married man. And that's just a partial list of the varieties of sexual experience that unfold over the course of two years in one teenager's life. ''100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed,'' written by the author when she was 16, is an autobiographical novel of sexual initiation in a small Sicilian city. It is composed in diary form -- a teen scream disguised as an erotic fairy tale. The book has sold some 850,000 copies in Italy and is being published in 24 languages. (The P is for Panarello; she revealed her last name when she turned 18, after working out a compromise with her mortified parents.) |
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The narrator is also named Melissa, and her ravenous desire to taste sex in the extreme puts her in the hands of cads (the angels, kings and princes of this tale), whose breathy grunts she often mistakes for adoration. The movement between fable and teenage confession -- all that loneliness, angst and longing -- makes for an odd tension in a story that otherwise might be considered conventional erotica, full of cliché and tease, stiletto-heeled lovers and spankers. One day she's hard-core, the next Cinderella.
Panarello could be the literary kid sister to Catherine Millet, whose memoir, ''The Sexual Life of Catherine M.,'' burned up the French best-seller list a few years ago. But while Millet, writing in the past tense, reveled in the lusty, if predictable, orgies in which she took part, celebrating each haphazard grope, Panarello, writing frequently in a here-and-now present tense, comes across as oddly detached -- a ''sex toy with an expiration date,'' as she puts it. Her writing about sex has a cool, dispassionate quality: ''We were fitted together like a key in a lock, like a farmer's spade thrust into rich, luxuriant soil. . . . My desire was making him sluggish, as if I were a cool, fizzy spumante that packed the necessary punch to exalt his senses and send him high as a kite.''
This young writer is no Colette, whose tales of sexual experimentation are little laboratories of psychological realism. Bored, consumed by her image in the mirror, desperate to find her prince, Panarello passes over her violent encounters with a kind of haughty simplicity: ''Who cares if it was right or wrong? The important thing is that we felt good.'' The shame she feels at being invaded by beastly lovers alternates with pride in her skill at seducing them. To purge her bad feelings, she ritually brushes her hair 100 times before bed. Princesses do this, her mother tells her, though the act is recast in Panarello's mind as punishment.
Books written by teenagers and billed as the next big thing often suffer from grand ambition hampered by immature writing. A first-timer's literary allusions infiltrate the prose -- Dante, ''The Bell Jar,'' Dante again. Cringe-inducing euphemisms abound here: lance, stake, scepter, Secret, River Lethe, erupting volcano. (Perhaps these words are more euphonious in Italian than in Lawrence Venuti's translation.)
A slapdash conclusion levitates the novel into the realm of the unbelievable (hint: it includes a prince of sorts). The peek into Melissa's liaisons holds an interest more prurient than literary. While the book has immediacy, its lack of insight -- something one hopes for in the whispered intimacy of a diary -- makes it predictable and even tiresome. If one trusts the reports that women hit their sexual peak in their 30's, Panarello has time to live as deeply as she desires -- and to sharpen her writing skills in the off hours. As for her life so far: ''Story of O'' it ain't, not yet.
Posh porn
(Filed: 11/07/2004)
In One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed, the narrator tells her diary about her fruitless search for love. The many men she encounters are, as the phrase goes, after only one thing. But this is hardly news. What's disturbing about the book is that the men sometimes have their way with the blindfolded diarist in groups of five. More shocking still is that the girl is only 15 and from a quiet Sicilian suburb. And, just to top it off, the book may be presented as fiction, but its contents are entirely autobiographical.
"We thought it was a joke," says Elido Fazi of Fazi Editore, a Roman publisher to whom the author sent the manuscript a year after writing it. "We thought it was a fantasist. 'I am from Sicily, I am 16, I have written an erotic diary.' " But it wasn't a joke. The author was so young that her parents, once they realised they could not prevent its publication, insisted on at least concealing their daughter's identity. In little more than a year, and in a country not known for its voracious bibliophilia, "Melissa P", as she is known, has amassed sales of 750,000. Her book will be published in Britain next month.
Melissa P is the ne plus ultra of an eye-watering literary phenomenon. Women have taken to writing, with what one can only describe as complete and utter candour, about their sex lives. And women – for it is mostly women – have been reading, copiously, gratefully, responsively. So distinctive are the titles of this mini-subgenre that they may as well be given their own shelf in bookshops. It would the "Women in Lust" section.
Needless to say, it was a Frenchwoman who started it. The Sexual Life of Catherine M by Catherine Millet was published in France in 2001. Millet catalogues a life of unbridled promiscuity, in which the author has sex for the first time at 18 and two weeks later is participating in her first orgy. At a swingers club she would park herself on a table, part her legs and, perhaps 30 couplings later, close them again. The book is determinedly unerotic, and forensic in its emotional detachment. That it has also sold well here is attributable, according to Pete Ayrton of Serpent's Tail, Millet's British publisher, to the fact that the author "falls within the stereotypes that the British have of the French: French women are just like rabbits going at it all the time".
But it turned out not just to be French women. Last year came A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance by Jane Juska, a retired American divorcée who placed the following advertisement in the New York Review of Books: "Before I turn 67 – next March – I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me." There was an avalanche of respondents, and she did indeed have sex with a number of them, including a man exactly half her age whose first postcoital words were, "I think your book just got more interesting."
Each of these books speaks to its own constituency. Most of Melissa P's huge postbag has been from teenage girls saying her book has changed their life. Millet has a sort of pan-sexual allure. Most of her letters come from men who are looking for what she calls une complicité libertine – they like a woman who behaves like a man. "But it's easier for women to address me directly in public meetings," she says, "or even when they recognise me in the street. Their solidarity is based more on neo-feminism." Juska says her readers are "by and large women in their fifties and sixties. At least, that's who mostly shows up when I do readings and signings. I have been amazed at the outpouring of appreciation: 'You've given me hope', 'Thank you for being so brave.' "
French swinger, Italian teen, American pensioner – clearly there is something out there to suit most tastes, and the list of options is expanding steadily. Look out also for Snakes and Earrings by a young Japanese woman called Hitomi Kanehari. Her award-winning book about an occasionally sadomasochistic sex life hit a nerve in Japan, where it won a huge literary prize and sold a million copies. Further down the line there is, from Spain, The Diary of a Nymphomaniac by a prostitute called Valerie Tasso and, from across the Mediterranean, The Almond by an Algerian author called Nedjma, whose autobiographical novel tells of a Moroccan Muslim woman who takes a lover to escape a sexually violent marriage. There's even a semi-autobiographical novel from India called Babyji, about a high-caste girl's sexual experiences with her teacher and others.
Of course, women have not suddenly taken up sex writing. Jackie Collins, Jilly Cooper and all those empowered scribes of the Black Lace imprint have been committing adultery to the page for years. The difference with this new phenomenon is not just that the writers are no longer making it up: it is that they have made sex-writing literary, even high-brow. Millet is the founding editor of a respected art journal in Paris; Juska's advertisement in America's high-brow literary bible – with presumably no pun intended – flagged her love of Trollope. As she promoted the book in Italy, Melissa P was finishing her school studies in Latin and Greek.
Meanwhile Vintage, an imprint at Random House, has suddenly realised that the company backlist is heaving with top-notch smut, and is cannily reissuing some of them under the umbrella title of Vintage Blue. A good half of the books are by male writers – Portnoy's Complaint is there, as is Jake's Thing and The Rachel Papers, along with The Fermata and The Swimming-Pool Library. But there is also The Passion by Jeanette Winterson, The Butcher by Alina Reyes, Linda Jaivin's saucy Eat Me and Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (whose latest novel, Sappho's Leap, is also just out).
The list came about when two years ago Rachel Cugnoni, the founding editor of Random House's sport imprint Yellow Jersey, suggested that "the next thing to do is sex. I said, rather foolishly, that we should set up a 'posh porn' list. In the last 10 years there has been an explosion of selling sex as lifestyle. Agent Provocateur used to be outré, but now their half-cut bras are in M&S."
Those looking for other symbols of the book trade's sexual liberation will have noted that one of this year's Man Booker judges is Rowan Pelling, editor of The Erotic Review . "Five years ago there would have been a big outcry if I'd been made a Booker judge," she says. "We were seen as a saucy magazine for men in tweeds. I was surprised. I didn't think I'd be considered quite literary enough to do something like that."
But even a woman who poses for her editorial mugshot in expensive underwear is slightly taken aback by the new public hankering for sexual memoirs. "Personally I wouldn't want to publish a book about all my most intimate experiences. Most of us prefer to keep those areas as hidden as possible." If even Pelling is squeamish, no wonder there is a glaring absence in this explosion of sexual frankness. In what one might term "the Eurovision thong contest", no British woman has stuck her head above the parapet and written down absolutely everything about her sex life.
Weidenfeld & Nicolson think they may have found Britain's entry. Belle de Jour, who claims to be a working prostitute, has been writing a hugely entertaining weblog since last year. The notable thing about Belle de Jour is that she writes incredibly well – with a witty turn of phrase and a worldly honesty that belie her alleged age (mid-twenties). Here she is on a Boxing Day shopping trip: "26 décembre 2003. Even with my advanced hunt-and-gather skills, I am unlikely to find this memoir of a Catanese teenager, 100 colpi di spazzola prima di andare a dormire, much as I really really truly want to read it (found at Pour en parler…)". In other words, she reads about Melissa P's book when surfing on a French website. She later buys and reads it in Italian. A tart who not only offers French but reads and writes it?
"Women will see her book as quite a fun thing to have," predicts Pelling, who publishes a monthly extract in The Erotic Review. "It's going to spark a lot of debates. Is she, isn't she, would you do that? There are very few women who haven't at some time or other imagined a scenario in which you find that is the only way you could make a living and entertained the idea, what would that be like, if that was the only way I could make money? I think it's rather a common thought process, probably like men thinking, what would it be like if I had to go away to war?"
If the author has her way, her identity will remain a secret. Precedent, however, is against her. Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, was published anonymously, only for John Cleland to be unmasked. The same went for Pauline Réage, author of Story of O, who was outed as Dominique Aury. Last year the author of The Bride Stripped Bare, a novel about an Australian housewife's sexual odyssey, was identified as Nikki Gemmell. The horrified parents of Melissa P, who had no idea about their teenage daughter's clandestine sex life until they found her journal, were keen to keep her authorship a secret. "The mother was absolutely frightened that her name would appear," says Elido Fazi. "We reached an agreement that we would publish the book as Melissa P and that we would never publish a photo." Eventually the author outed herself as Melissa Panarello.
But Millet, like Juska, decided from the outset that she had nothing to hide, either by using a pseudonym or pretending to be making it up. "Straight away it was obvious that to give credence to my story I had to assume my own name," she says.
Why has this literary evolution happened now? According to Ayrton of Serpent's Tail, who has imported Catherine M and Melissa P, it is simply "a continuation of feminism", or what Millet calls "pro-sex feminism". Clearly they all act as updates on the sexual mores of the culture they emerge from. Kanehari's book, says Cugnoni, who will publish it here, "reflects Japanese society changing in just one generation: what's happening to those teenagers is almost unrecognisable to their parents".
Similarly in Italy, with One Hundred Strokes. "One thing that really struck us," says Fazi, "there was almost no difference between a young Sicilian in a small village and some equivalent in Milan. The homogenisation is amazing." In other words, they are not only personal memoirs but documents of a wider sexual evolution. Readers have fallen on their enfranchising message greedily.
"It wouldn't be published if it didn't sell," says Pelling. "I've never taken the view that the British aren't a sexual race. But there has always been this view, don't frighten the horses. I want to punch the wall every time a commentator says, 'The thing is, the sex is really dull.' That's what we are socially conditioned to think. The truth is, it's not boring."
Through the looking glass
(Filed: 22/08/2004)
Helen Brown reviews One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed by Melissa P
Title
One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed
Author
Melissa P
Publisher
176pp, Serpent's Tail, £10
ISBN
185242866X
A quote on the cover of this "worldwide erotic bestseller" – it has sold 750,000 copies in Italy – promises that young Melissa P's diary "will utterly scandalise the people who still think of teenage girls as half-formed dolls in pretty boxes". Who are these people? Surely nobody who has ever met a teenage girl.
Middle-class Sicilian Melissa P has claimed that this book, charting her sexual experiences from the age of 14 to 16, is based on her own life, omitting only her more extreme adventures. One thing that can be said for it is that it does read – very convincingly – as the work of a precocious teenager. It's seething with reckless confidence, isolated angst and portentous convictions of the romanticised self. The story opens in the heroine's bedroom, which is plastered with Klimt and Dietrich posters. There's the obligatory identification with Sylvia Plath. She feels that neither her parents nor her teachers make an effort to understand her, and she takes no interest in anything beyond her sexuality.
Unlike her schoolmate Alessandra, who confesses to violent rape fantasies, our stripling narrator is turned on simply by looking in a mirror: "The only thing that really makes me feel good is the image I behold and love; everything else is make-believe. My friendships are fake, born by chance and raised in mediocrity, utterly superficial."
Repulsed by the clumsy-tongued kisses of boys her own age, she writes: "I want love, Diary. I want to feel my heart melt, want to see my icy stalactites shatter and plunge into a river of passion and beauty."
But when she does meet a boy with a Greek profile and a mouth that tangs of strawberries, he treats her cruelly, kindling a very teenage lust for self-destruction. As the diarist possesses an eager young body and a lithe imagination, there's a greedy-eyed queue of Humberts lining up to help her in her quest to feel the excitements of using and being used. She celebrates her 16th birthday blindfolded on her knees, fellating five stoned students; becomes the rented-room mistress of a flabby married man; enjoys phone sex; and pays to watch gay lovers penetrate each other. "How does a girl like me love and punish herself at the same time?" she wonders.
But the novel unfortunately proves Nabokov's observation that writing about sex is simply the copulation of clichés. A whole armoury of lances, sceptres and hilts pierces our heroine's "Secret" or "sea of Lethe". Worms burrow into her earth. There are the expected eruptions, electrifications and earthquakes. "You're mature, intelligent and you have this passion inside you that's utterly boundless," the lover tells her, right before he dumps her. After each temporarily empowering encounter, this wannabe Lolita stumbles home to brush out her hair with 100 cleansing strokes, like the princesses of fairy-tale towers.
Most of her tale made me simply sad at her very normal loneliness and self-hatred, and angry at those who are complicit in making her feel cheap and dirty in what I hope are abnormal situations for a young teenager to inhabit. She doesn't see herself as vulnerable, but she is – rawly and recklessly so. Mercifully for the reader, and for herself, she does "escape from the ogre's tower" to end up in "the castle of the Arab prince" who transforms her back into a princess "so beautiful that even dreams want to steal her away".
Thoroughly modern Melissa
(Filed: 24/08/2004)
Jane Shilling reviews One Hundred Strokes of the Brush before Bed by Melissa P.
As every parent knows, adolescent girls keep diaries. The contents of these journals are invariably secret, vigorously guarded by their authors with padlocks and eloquent maledictions against the snooping parental eye scrawled on the cover in multicoloured felt pen.
Within the forbidden covers, however, the contents are generally the same: a languorous cocktail of clothes and crushes, spots and homework, best friends and boyfriends.
Such artless reveries are, needless to say, a pornographer's dream. The history of erotic literature purporting to be the genuine musings of a jeune fille en fleur is probably as old as the history of diary-keeping itself. The past couple of publishing seasons has produced a vigorous flowering of erotic memoirs by writers such as Catherine Millet and Jane Juska, who are well past the budding stage. But now there has appeared the English translation of a volume that claims to be the real thing: One Hundred Strokes of the Brush before Bed, by Melissa P. It is a best-seller in Italy and has elicited a "remain chaste" entreaty from the Pope.
Melissa, according to her author biography, was "born in 1985 into a middle-class family, (and) grew up in Aci Castello near Catania in Sicily". She is a "keen reader" , "a great admirer of . . . Anais Nin" and in 2000 began keeping the diary whose entries between 2000 and 2002 are published as One Hundred Strokes.
These were a busy couple of years for Melissa. In July 2000 she was a 15-year-old virgin, inhabiting a "shadowy room" in her parents' house "plastered with posters of Marlene Dietrich". By July 2002 the decor has changed and so has Melissa. Marlene has been replaced with "a photo of me, my hair in the wind", and Melissa has found true love with a bloke called Claudio, who says "You shouldn't feel imprisoned by me or my love. You're an angel who must fly free." Which makes a nice change from all the other chaps Melissa encounters in her two-year sexual Odyssey - peremptory types who say things like "Turn over, slut!" and "Come on, scream".
You'd think a teenage virgin might be put off by such rude behaviour, but Melissa is nothing if not determined. On she slogs in pursuit of true love, through a sexual awakening that might seem a trifle schematic, if only it weren't all entirely true. Group sex, voyeurism, sado-masochism, chat-rooms, cross-dressing . . . there's even a dream about that most wayward of all sexual activities (for a nice Catholic girl) - doing it with a priest.
Her parents seem entirely unaware that they are harbouring the Sicilian equivalent of Fanny Hill in an upstairs bedroom.
It would be surprising if a teenage diary were not rather callow and unformed in style, and perhaps it is the English translation, by Lawrence Venuti, that is responsible for the clunking genital euphemisms ("my fireplace", "his lance") to which Melissa is unluckily devoted. The tiny inauthentic detail, which makes one wonder whether this memoir mightn't contain some element of invention, is Melissa's odd habit of wearing hold-up stockings with jeans, which sounds more like male fantasy than anything a real woman of any age would do: the friction between the jeans and the stockings would make the hold-ups fall down in highly unerotic fashion. Or perhaps Sicilian stockings are just more tenacious than the regular variety.
Jane Shilling is the author of 'The Fox in the Cupboard: A Memoir' (Viking).
July 30, 2005
Her sex scenes are delightful
MELISSA KATSOULIS
ONE HUNDRED STROKES OF THE BRUSH BEFORE BED
by Melissa P
DIARY OF A MANHATTAN CALL-GIRL
by Tracy Quan
Melissa and Tracy are naughty girls who deserve to be punished. Sorry, published. And published they were — Melissa in Italy, where everyone was horrified at her diary of a teenage nymphomaniac, and Tracy in America, where her uptown romp was hailed as the thinking woman’s Pretty Woman.
But Italy’s outrage and America’s praise have less to do with cultural mores and more to do with the content of these two sexually explicit novels. Melissa P appears naked and sultry, a young- looking 17, on the cover of One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed (Serpent’s Tail, £10; offer £9) while Quan’s Diary of a Manhattan Call-Girl (HarperPerennial, £6.99; offer £6.64) is all swirly writing and cartoon knickers, and her smiling photo is wholesome as hell.
Erotic books have to advertise their content on the cover, but it would be a shame for squeamishness to lose Melissa P any readers, because hers is in fact a revolutionary account of adolescent sexuality. It charts Melissa’s passage from narcissistic virgin to fully fledged sexual explorer, via a string of often humiliating encounters with older men. But the heroine is not a victim. She is smart enough to know when her boundaries are being stretched beyond safety, and she stops before she is ruined.
Quan’s book is adult with a capital A. Nancy has achieved wealth and independence by maintaining standards of prostitutional excellence that would satisfy the most stringent Oftart inspector. She offers safe clean fun in a nurturing environment and knows exactly where to draw the line (anal? Ew!). But when she becomes engaged to a man from the “straight” world and faces giving up the life she loves, she finds that being kept by a husband scares her more than being owned by her johns. It takes thousands of dollars of therapy and girly lunches to work out what to do.
Both these books are fun to read, and mark the transition of erotica from hide-it-under-the-bed to read-it-on-the-Tube. Quan is of the Candace Bushnell school of chick lit, so her work is heavy on the designer names and Ohmigods and, sadly, also on the cumbersome social conscience: her descriptions of feminist focus groups and political activists are embarrassing and often degrading, whereas her sex scenes are delightful. As for Signorina P — steer clear if you have a teenage daughter.
But if you have a teenage son whom you wish was more into reading . . .
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I'M A TEEN PORNQUEEN
Aug 22 2004
Sex book hits UK
From Nick Pisa In Rome
A SENSATIONAL sex book written by a girl of 15 is about to go on sale in Britain.
Melissa Panarello's graphic story of how she lost her virginity, had an orgy with five men, then sex with a married man, a transvestite and a lesbian has caused outrage.
But the book has also been a runaway success, selling 1.5million copies worldwide - and knocking Harry Potter off the top of the best-seller list in her native Italy.
And Melissa, who is now a millionaire at just 18, is delighted. Sitting in her second-floor flat in Rome she said: "Of course my book is pornographic - but it's not negative pornography. Pornography is part of our civilisation, yet we are always told to take it as vulgar and dirty but it shouldn't be like that - after all sex is a central part of our lives.
"I'm glad my book has caused controversy because it gets people talking and it brings sex out into the open."
Some critics have suggested the book, called One Hundred Strokes Of The Brush Before Bed, is more imagination than reality.
But Melissa said: "Just because Italian society says it's not normal for 16-year-old girls to have sex doesn't mean that it didn't happen. Lots of my friends had similar sexual experiences. I admit there was no love involved, it was just sex for the sake of it - it was as if I had become addicted to it."
The book opens with Melissa exploring her body in front of a mirror and quickly moves on to a graphic account of an oral sex act with her boyfriend.
A few pages further on she takes part in a marijuana-fuelled orgy in which she is blindfolded and has sex with five men. Written in a diary format the book says: "They did with me what one is permitted to do in the cell of desires. I didn't hear a word, only sighs and caresses. From what little I could make out, the guys present in the room didn't appear ugly, and this consoled me."
Later, she tells her diary: "I looked at myself and saw a mouth that had been violated so many times that night and had lost its freshness. I felt invaded, fouled by foreign bodies. Then I brushed my hair a hundred times as princesses do."
Melissa's parents were so shocked when they first saw the manuscript they tried to stop the book being published.
Melissa said: "They didn't want their daughter seen as being involved in porn. But I told them I would get lawyers involved if they didn't let me publish."
readysteadybook
One Hundred Strokes of the Brush
Before Bed
by Melissa P
Natasha Tripney
This is a weird one. Billed as "the worldwide erotic
bestseller" One Hundred Strokes Of the Brush Before Bed takes the form of the
diary of a Sicilian teenage girl, the entries recounting her many varied sexual
encounters. It’s a slender volume spanning just over two years of her life but
it manages to encompass most acts on the sexual spectrum along the way.
Melissa has her first experience with a man in 2000, aged fourteen. Attracted to
pretty, arrogant Daniele, she performs oral sex in a pool house and when this
fails to provoke the loving response she desires, she allows herself to go
further. Still unsatisfied, the experimentation that follows seems to be
attempting to check every box on a rather pornographic list. Melissa has sex
with her tutor. Melissa does something unpleasant with a whip and a dildo.
Melissa fellates five men in a row. Melissa tries it out with another girl.
Melissa gets a man off online. Melissa watches two men have sex for her own
pleasure.
There’s little more to it than that. It’s not exactly the Story of O for our
times as it claims. The prose is diary-style, flat and occasionally rather coy
given the subject matter. There are lots of entries along the lines of "he aimed
his long lance at my sex". The men rarely have penises but instead lances and
sceptres; Melissa has her Secret. I suppose this is meant to underline Melissa’s
youth, to remind us that she is still a young girl despite her exploits.
Presumably this is also the reason we repeatedly hear how she brushes her hair
through a hundred times before going to sleep, just "like a Princess". It’s a
purposefully incongruous image that gives the book its title.
Melissa’s world outlook seems alarmingly narrow, her parents register only as
minor irritations and September 11th 2001 warrants only a one line entry as she
ponders whether her lover is watching the same images on the television as she
is. In the end a man finally returns her love, validating her journey. Until
then the only remotely tender moment (as tender as a scene of mutual
masturbation can be) happens between Melissa and Ernesto, the rent boy with a
penchant for women’s clothing. The narrative seems to be claiming that Melissa’s
was a search for love all along, but it’s not an argument that’s very
convincing.
The book’s crucial flaw is that as a protagonist Melissa is presented as a
vulnerable, rather damaged girl. Though she initiates many of these encounters
she is never fully in control, she gains no empowerment through her exploits. We
view the sex through her eyes and as such it appears, without exception, hollow,
empty and cold. As such it is completely unerotic, a major mistake for a piece
of supposedly erotic writing; ultimately on the most basic level One Hundred
Strokes of the Brush Before Bed fails on its own terms.
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Afterschool Shockfest
An 18-year-old author on the sex diary that scandalized Europe. (Yes, Europe).
If you consider
the tale of a teenage girl fucking a married man in the ass with a vinyl dildo a
raunchy one, then Melissa Panarello, author of
100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed
(translated from Italian by Lawrence Venuti), has written a veritably raunchy
book. The facts that it's an "autobiographical novel" and the Italian author is
barely eighteen have elevated 100 Strokes
to an international scandal and commercial success: more than 700,000 copies
have been sold in Italy alone. Her critics take personal affront at Panarello's
raw discussions of underage sexuality — blindfolded group sex, simulated rape —
while her advocates (like, um, this month's
Teen Vogue) praise her courage and honesty.
Nerve recently spoke with the book world's "it" girl of iniquity and found
out that she's as un-interested in being the courageous, honest Voice of a
Generation as she is in being the next European Wurtzel or Fielding — young,
erudite, emotionally diseased and proud of it. In fact, Panarello was more
poised than prurient, not exactly the girl in heat she shamelessly describes in
her work. — Carrie Hill Wilner
Is your age more controversial than your
material?
Obviously. Erotic books come out all the time, but not that many cause
controversy or sell a lot of copies. At least in my opinion, the material in
itself isn't really scandalous, and I think the scandal in other people's
opinion is that this is coming from a young girl. It's an autobiographical novel
written in the form of the diary of Melissa P., my alter ego, recounting this
series of sort of degrading sexual experiences she has through the age of
sixteen. And well, teenagers having and talking about extreme sexual experiences
will always cause controversy.
Do you think there's a valid distinction
between "erotic literature" and literature proper, and do you consider yourself
a writer of erotica?
I understand the distinction, and I enjoy reading what I consider erotic
literature, but I don't particularly relate to what it represents. I'd describe
my book as about growing up in a dangerous world.
Should Melissa's behavior shock and
upset people, or is it within the normal range?
It's definitely not normal. But I consider the most scandalous thing the fact
that the book is [considered] scandalous. It bespeaks a real sort of
close-mindedness that this sort of discussion is still considered out of line.
What about the critics who use this as
an excuse to lament the general downfall of Modern Youth? Do you think there are
elements of Melissa's experience that reflect a more widespread sexual reality?
I find the suggestion that I'd speak for a whole generation pretty ridiculous.
In the same way you can't suggest there's one book that speaks for the whole
adult world, you can't say a book speaks to or reflects the adolescent
experience. That certainly wasn't my intention.
Every mildly scandalous artifact of
youth culture is held up as an example of how we're all going to hell. Why do
you think people are so eager to find these messages and generalizations?
I don't know, it can be partially explained as arrogance, and as people
diagnosing others as degenerates so that they can feel good about themselves.
And no one ever thinks carefully about what's going on in the larger world that
precipitates this behavior they find so shocking. No one makes an effort to
understand who we are and why we do what we do, only to criticize those actions.
Maybe they're just jealous.
I could see that. I don't know, it seems so many people just don't have the
tools to relate to young people, I don't know why, and that seems very scary to
them. Jealousy, yes, but also incompetence.
Ideally, how would your book be
received?
For one, people would look more at the book itself, instead of this fixation
with everything around it.
One thing that's unavoidable but sort of
annoying when you write about your own sexuality is that there will be a subset
of readers who will use your writing as pornography — what are your feelings
about that?
I don't know, seeing as I often read erotic comics or erotic books simply to be
turned on. I've never really thought of that response as anything but human
nature.
Reading
100 Strokes
can be both very jarring and a turn-on — were there parts that were upsetting or
arousing for you to write?
Not really. There weren't many emotions involved in the moment [I was writing].
I was more trying to understand.
Was it entirely based on your own
experience?
A lot is real, some is fantasy, but I consider it autobiographical because it's
very much where I was at that time. In that sense, it's a faithful account.
Why did you decide on a diary format?
My publisher and I spoke about doing a regular novel, but it didn't really work,
there's not much plot.
Despite the risqué content and
non-traditional structure of the book, it follows a traditional narrative in
terms of the bad girl meets good boy and is saved by love storyline. Why rely on
that?
I was encouraged to make the ending darker, but in the end I really consider the
narrative a sort of a fairy tale, and I think it works.
There's a scene in the book where
Melissa's mother uses a fairy tale to help Melissa learn from her experiences.
Do you think that moral lesson is at the center of
100 Strokes
as well, or is it just an aspect of Melissa's experience?
I definitely think the lesson of that fable is relevant to the book, and to my
experience. It's not incidental.
How did people around you react to the
book?
My parents weren't thrilled. They didn't want me to publish it at first, though
they've come to understand its importance and necessity to me. My friends quite
liked it; I'd read them passages for editing as I was writing. My professors
reacted poorly, but I left school, so that doesn't really matter.
Do you get a lot of creepy fan mail?
Strangely enough, considering the success of the book, I haven't gotten much of
that. I got some strange email from one couple, but it's really more degrading
to them than it is to myself. The few times it's happened, I've just laughed it
off.
You were talking earlier about your own
experience with erotic literature, can you tell me about the first pieces you
found particularly interesting, or that influenced your writing?
Well, it wasn't really an everyone's-doing-it-so-I-can-too that prompted me to
write this. I probably would have done it had I not been exposed to any erotic
literature. I can't think of anything specific that opened up my mind.
Still, writing something like this
requires quite a bit of courage. Where do you think you get those resources
from?
It's flattering that you say that but I never relied on any big swell of
courage, it was a pretty normal process for me, and I didn't really anticipate
the reaction, one way or the other. It was just a part of my daily life, it was
pretty easy. Courage doesn't have that much to do with writing.
Italy's had a pretty strong tradition of
very young writers over the past few decades; there's no real parallel in the
States. Do you see yourself in this tradition?
I prefer to think in global terms, and in that sense, I do see myself as part of
a general tendency. There are a lot of very young people writing about what they
know in a very autobiographical manner, a lot of young Japanese writers, then
you have JT Leroy, for example. I think we're really witnessing a new movement
that's global. That's the level at which these things are happening, and that's
the context I see myself in, more than a national context.
Where do you think that energy is coming
from, that this is happening right now?
I don't know, probably now more than ever, we're totally alienated from our
surroundings, or rather, there's this world we don't
want to belong to, and so people are
examining themselves.
It's a crisis we're all living right now.
gingerbeer.co.uk
One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed
One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed is the fictionalised memoir of a highly libidinous Sicilian teenager, who seeks love and companionship through a series of heterosexual sexual situations, involving impromptu one night stands in the backseat of cars, spliff induced group orgies and S&M.
The novel unfolds in a series of diary entries from 6 July 2000 – 12 August 2002. The writer is fifteen and extraordinarily confident and promiscuous for her age. As reader, we dangle vehemently in our ignoble position. Is this the Melissa? Melissa P. the writer only 18 years in real life, herself? Or a desirous alter ego? We never know.
Melissa is not an easy character to get close to. She is flirtatious and sexy but unemotional and detached, which sometimes deadens the passion she describes. Although she finds it fulfilling, Melissa does not appear to enjoy the sex she is having with any passion. The author does however, deserve merit for her brutal honesty and frank vulgarity. And she definitely gets our sympathy, since most of the men Melissa sleeps with are chauvinist bastards that say things like: ‘Your cunt lips are so big and juicy. Why don’t you shave? You’d be even more beautiful.’ Thankfully Melissa is unperturbed in her reply: ‘I didn’t respond. What I do with it is none of his business.’
Melissa uses sex as a powerful tool in her quest for love. She is aware of her immense amount of power over men, although there is deep pathos in her insatiable need for their attention. Her only comfort at the end of each engagement comes when she is alone in her room and Melissa makes her hair shine again with ‘one hundred strokes of the brush before bed.’ It is notable that Melissa is oddly not so self-assured when it comes to her one and only liasion with a woman: ‘Last night I entered a lesbian chat room. To try a woman. I don’t find the idea entirely repulsive. More than anything else it embarrasses me, frightens me.’
The main problem with the protagonist’s promiscuity in this story, is the reason provided for it. I am not convinced that her proclaimed desire and yearning for love is why Melissa behaves as she does. She seems too bright to know that she is not going to find it like that.
Defining a genre for this novel is debatable. The literary establishment would argue in favour of erotica, no doubt, but I am not turned on or given the horn. The underlying tone of Anais Nin and influences of Vladmir Nabakov are unmissable. Indeed Melissa becomes Lo of Nabakov’s Lolita for her maths professor lover.
But sex is not embellished or exoticised. Sexually explicit passages are often laden with poetic description and evocative imagery, but could do with being lengthier to convey more of an erotic feel. Instead, Melissa P.’s sex is full on and gratuitous, sadomasochist and always voyeuristic, as it would need to be to qualify as porn – so perhaps in this sense it is. The author in fact qualifies this idea of pornography telling us that: ‘…in the long run even a porno novel might metamorphose into a tale of love and affection.’
Reviewed by Nadia Gilani
And this is what happens in the end, when the writer’s porno novel turns romantic, as Melissa meets a man she tries to lure into bed who declines on grounds that he really loves her and can only have sex if it means making love. Melissa unused to this sort of thing, having only been with men who abandon her once they have had their fill, paralyses and is unsure of what to do. Still, eventually she is able to let in the love she has been craving so long: ‘My desire for him is strong and intense; I can’t do without his presence.’ And that is it.
I hoped instead that after so much unloving sex, Melissa would realise that sex and love can be mutually exclusive. I wanted her to turn on her heels defiantly and either stop it or think: Fuck it. I love sex, I want sex, I’m good at sex, I will have sex purely for sex. Instead of striving to please men in return for their love. But she doesn’t. For Melissa to change the motive of her promiscuity and to fully own it would have definitely had me satisfied. But perhaps it is unfair and unrealistic of me to ask this of her since her promiscuous behaviour is meant to be a symptom of unhappiness. So essentially the novel comes to its idyllic end where Melissa gets what she wants. The reader perhaps does not.
Finally to address the awkward situation of translation. It’s not easy and it doesn’t really work. Lawrence Venuti manages to retain a semblance of what the Italian should sound like, albeit often stilted and clumsily with use of cringe worthy synonyms for male genitalia such as ‘member,’ but this is perhaps just personal preference. The language is thus, not as compelling and absorbing as it could be, and this novel has the infuriating effect of making you feel helpless and incapable, wishing you could read and understand the superior Italian original.
All said, Melissa P.’s debut is a best seller in Italy with 800, 000 copies sold to date and is sure to cause a stir upon publication in the UK this summer. A film version of the novel has already been optioned by Francesca Neri – star of Hannibal. Expect controversy.
|
21 maggio 2005
Il nuovo libro, che uscirà sabato prossimo, racconta il rapporto con la madre e la ricerca di dolcezza
"L'odore del tuo respiro", il ritorno di Melissa P.
I "100 colpi di spazzola" hanno venduto due milioni e mezzo di copie e sono diventati a loro modo un caso
di LUCIANA SICA
Dopo
il celebre "diario" algidamente sporcaccione, intitolato 100 colpi di spazzola
prima di andare a dormire, un best seller da due milioni e mezzo di copie, è in
programma per sabato prossimo l'uscita del nuovo libro di Melissa P. (ma visto
che di questa giovanissima autrice non c'è più nulla di anonimo da tempo, chi sa
poi perché non usare il cognome per esteso: Panarello suona male?).
S'intitola L'odore del tuo respiro (pagg. 140, euro
12), e naturalmente è ancora Fazi a pubblicarlo, con una prima tiratura di 250
mila copie, fremendo - s'immagina - per l'esito di questa nuova prova narrativa
che concede pochissimo alle scorribande sessuali di una volta, peraltro di segno
assai luttuoso, e molto invece all'antico ma sempreverde binomio "sex and love",
insomma a un erotismo più casalingo seppure coniugato ai più sublimi palpiti del
cuore, e poi anche ai furori di una gelosia malatissima e alla fine a un certo
perverso masochismo femminile, di natura decisamente ancestrale piuttosto che
generazionale.
A rischio di essere considerati acidi o sentenziosi, incapaci
di cogliere il talento di un'autrice che qualcuno ha un po' frettolosamente
catalogato "di culto", mettiamola così: di Melissa, di questa diciannovenne
senz'altro provvista di una sua autenticità sofferta e inquieta, piuttosto
enigmatica per mescolare sapientemente candori e furbizie, insofferenze e
presenzialismi, di questa bella ragazza timida e spregiudicata quello che
soprattutto colpisce è l'ipertrofia dell'Io, un egocentrismo (prima umano e poi,
quel che conta, letterario) così paradossale da risultare sconcertante.
Melissa ha il
difetto, l'immaturità di prendersi terribilmente sul serio: mai una volta che
venga sfiorata dalla leggerezza, dall'ironia, dal senso dell'umorismo. Quel che
è peggio: tutto il pathos eternamente autoreferenziale che riversa nelle pagine,
la sincerità del suo dolore - a tratti credibilissimo - si esprime spesso in
forme linguistiche di un'ingenuità imbarazzante.
Quando scrive, ad esempio: "... sono stufa di darmi a pezzi.
Ho bisogno di estendermi all'infinito", "Catania è così, una puttana che non
parla perché qualcuno la soffoca. Io sono un essere profondamente catanese",
"Non mi piace il Colosseo, sembra un maschio ormai maturo che vuole dimostrare a
tutti la sua virilità, pur avendola persa. Non lo sopporto. Mi ha stancata",
"L'ultima cosa che deve fare un uomo è chiedermi cosa penso di lui. Non penso
niente, che c'è da pensare. Se ti amo ti amo, se mi fai schifo mi fai schifo",
"Il luccicare delle stelle è un riverbero piatto e monotono, rispetto al
luccicare dei suoi occhi"... O anche: "Con i capezzoli eretti, avrei voluto
torturarlo", frase di cui Melissa s'innamora a tal punto da ripeterla più volte
in pochissime pagine. Una reiterazione che lascia sbigottito chi proprio non ce
la fa a cogliere la superbia dell'immagine.
Il plot del breve "romanzo", che continua a somigliare a un
diario autobiografico anche se non ne ha la forma consueta, è piuttosto esile:
Melissa ha lasciato la provincia di Catania per vivere a Roma, e qui finalmente
incontra il vero agognato Principe azzurro abbandonando - s'intende - quella sua
lugubre esistenza eternamente a luci rosse che ha provocato tanto scandalo,
pruderie, moralismo, ma anche - prevedibilmente - una curiosa forma d'invidia.
Dunque Melissa s'innamora di Thomas (nome del suo noto,
attuale compagno) e ne è ricambiata. Peccato che non vivano felici e contenti,
essendo lei del tutto refrattaria alla serenità che a torto o a ragione si
attribuisce a una relazione stabile, abitata com'è da furori, paure, tormenti e
fantasmi persecutori. Sarà il demone della gelosia a spingerla verso una
dimensione sempre più ossessiva, fino a una fuga dolorosa e claustrofobica e
all'effettaccio finale di un tentativo di suicidio.
Sullo sfondo c'è l'infanzia di Melissa che sembra già così
lontana, quel passato maniacale un po' squallido, ma soprattutto la graduale
conquista di un rapporto "nuovo" con la madre, il desiderio di recuperarne
l'affettività, di riannodare pienamente i fili della comprensione e della
dolcezza. E' proprio questa mescolanza di sentimenti e anche di eros per il
"ragazzo" adorato, ma non più della madre amatissima, è quest'aspetto un po'
confuso ma in qualche modo seducente a coinvolgere, a stuzzicare le fantasie
meno prevedibili: in fondo ogni donna in cerca di un uomo che si prenda cura di
lei, più che un amante o un compagno o un padre sta desiderando una madre
incestuosa.
Melissa lo dice in questo modo: "... E quando abbiamo fatto
l'amore non c'era più lui, ma c'era lui e c'eri anche tu. C'ero io, solo una
comparsa. Tu e lui mi avete amata, squarciata e baciata. Vedevo il tuo naso, la
sua bocca, le tue orecchie e i suoi occhi. Sentivo battere due cuori anziché uno
e quando il mio corpo ha avuto un sussulto ho urlato "Ti amo tanto, tantissimo"
e lo stavo dicendo anche a te.
"Tu e lui, custodi della mia anima e del mio corpo.
Presuntuosamente affacciati sulla terrazza della mia vita, la osservate e la
proteggete come io non vi ho chiesto, come io non pretendo.
"Il suo sudore aveva il sapore del tuo collo e il suo collo
aveva il sapore di te. Poi più niente. Le palpebre si sono abbassate come il
tendone dopo lo spettacolo e i respiri lievi e soddisfatti si sono intrecciati
con gli odori della stanza. E tu sei rimasta".
Sembra che sia il giovane Thomas, attraverso un suo paziente
e delicatissimo maternage, a permettere alla fragile e ribelle Melissa la
riscoperta tanto emozionante del ruolo di figlia, e forse ad averle consentito
di scrivere L'odore del tuo respiro, un libro che - a differenza del primo, e
comunque si voglia giudicarlo - non si presenta come un Viagra cartaceo.
il Giornale●it
Martedì, 28 giugno 2005
Fabrizio Ottaviani
Un libro sciatto, stampato per errore
Mettiamola così: due anni fa la casa editrice Fazi gioca un tiro mancino alla curiosità che un pubblico adulto, di cui tutti corteggiano solo l’ipocrisia, nutre verso la sessualità degli adolescenti. Con mossa spiazzante e senso dell’umorismo la casa editrice schiva la strada della morbosità e dà invece in pasto a quel pubblico, in bilico tra provincialismo e globalizzazione, una figura solare, maliziosa e per nulla volgare. Inventa un personaggio, Melissa P., anzi lo fabbrica come un golem, ispirandosi a una giovanissima siciliana in carne e ossa che avrebbe avuto precoci esperienze, o forse non le ha avute ma tanto fa lo stesso. Produce il libro. E soprattutto escogita un titolo straordinario, due efferati pseudo-ottonari che da soli valgono il prezzo del volume e ne legittimano il successo: Cento colpi di spazzola prima di andare a dormire. I lettori corrono all’appuntamento, dove ritta accanto a una porta laccata di bianco attende una sorridente maschera in polpe, che invita a sbirciare nel buco della serratura. Attraverso la quale, inutile dirlo, non si vede niente se non la proiezione delle proprie fantasie: figuratevi se una ragazza di 15 anni scrive sul diario «durante le ore di lezione poggiavo il mio Segreto sul piedistallo in ferro del banco e facevo una leggera pressione col corpo»; o «mi ha spinta sempre più giù, mostrandomi bruscamente l’Ignoto». Le ragazze di oggi intercalano cazzi ovunque anche se il referente della parola non sosta nei paraggi, mentre «l’Ignoto» maiuscolato sarà per loro piuttosto la Costituzione Italiana o il nome dell’attuale presidente del Senato. Il libro vende due milioni e mezzo di copie: abbastanza perché il golem, da bravo golem, si ribelli e strappi dalle mani del suo creatore la stella della libertà per appuntarsela al petto. Melissa strepita, rivendica, e ottiene di poter scrivere lei, e solo lei, il volume successivo: L’odore del tuo respiro (Fazi, pagg. 138, euro 12). È solo un’ipotesi, naturalmente, ma le ipotesi hanno questo di buono: funzionano anche se sono false.
La trama del nuovo romanzo? Melissa, lo sappiamo, è diventata ricca e famosa; potrebbe pagarsi un biglietto d’aereo (con partenza da Catania) per un qualsiasi paradiso esotico e godersi lì il successo. E invece, incredibile, decide di trasferirsi a Roma: a Roma, che come noto è la tomba delle muse e negli ultimi cinquant’anni ha logorato, distrutto o perfidamente spinto a ripiegare sulla sceneggiatura scrittori ben più solidi della piccola siciliana. Appena giunta nella capitale la giovane donna scriverà una «Lettera Alla Mamma», perché la famiglia è importante e per chi ha un passato come il suo si impone un redde rationem senza infingimenti. Il risultato di tanta inattesa palingenesi è più che imbarazzante: è triste.
L’odore del tuo respiro è un romanzo che sembra caduto dal decimo piano. Uno scartafaccio stampato per errore, un file perso e ripristinato male dal backup. La sciatteria di queste pagine tocca livelli celesti: è misteriosa la ragione per cui una casa editrice (che nella stessa collana ospita La rosa tatuata di Renzo Paris!) abbia ucciso la gallina dalle uova d’oro, permettendo a Melissa di rovinarsi da sé. Senza suggerirle un corso di scrittura creativa, senza metterle accanto una volpe redazionale, senza imporle una quota minima di editing. È, questo, un libro illeggibile, l’autoritratto di una persona in stato di confusione mentale che si scaraventa addosso tutta la pubblicità negativa possibile. Della candida e serena vocina di Cento colpi di spazzola, che a tratti sembrava provenire da una Lucia Poli in vena di spiritosaggini erotiche, non è rimasto nulla e i due testi sembrano scritti da persone diverse.
Per pietà, ridateci indietro la vecchia Melissa: stavolta il tempo non è stato galantuomo.
Le confessioni di Melissa P.
“Sono orgogliosa, estrema e soffro a scrivere di sesso”
Incontro con Melissa P., al secondo romanzo dopo “Cento colpi di spazzola…”. La confessione de un’autrice a cui non piace la vita regolare e che odia i moralisti
Giancarlo Perna
Aspettando Melissa Panarello in ritardo di mezz’ora, potevo annoiarmi a morte se non fosse che sono capitato alla Fazi editore in un momento di sgranchimento generale delle gambe. Editor e impiegati, ambosessi sui 20 anni, stappano bottigliette e parlano compresi di libri. Rare femmine adulte si mescolano come insegnanti alla ricreazione di un liceo. Molti fanno pausa al sole sul terrazzo dell’appartamento che copre l’intero primo piano di un palazzo vicino a Villa Borghese, a Roma.
Tra i gironzolanti individuo a naso, Thomas, il figlio dell’editore Elido Fazi e fidanzato di Melissa. Ha una sontuosa capigliatura afro-cubana e un bell’abito braghe e camicia che gli sono saltati addosso quando era ancora mezzo addormentato. I ciuffi crespi all’insù gli sono venuti dopo avere letto quello che ha scritto di lui la fidanzata nella sua seconda prova d’autore, L’odore del tuo respiro. In cui odore e respiro spiattellati ai quattro venti sono appunto quelli del povero Thomas. L’infelice, violato nella sua intimità, pesantemente insultato a ogni pagina, è infatti il coprotagonista del romanzo di cui Melissa è la protagonista assoluta.
Ma eccola, Melissa. Imbocca la porta una bamboletta che spazza il pavimento coi jeans. Oscilla su un paio di scarpe con tacchi di corda. Età e altezza media dell’appartamento si abbassano con l’arrivo della piccina. Il fenomeno letterario dell’ultimo biennio ha, ora, 19 anni e una statura da geisha di 1,47, ma proporzionata.
«Scusi il ritardo», dice gentile e mi dà la mano. Ha lo smalto alle unghie, color sangue di bue rappreso.
«È lei la diva», dico con un inchino. Sgusciando tra i Fazi boys in dotta discussione, sediamo a un tavolo nel terrazzo.
«Dedica il suo libro “A Thomas che sa annusare la mia gonna”. Che virtù è?», chiedo.
«Sa apprezzare la mia femminilità per quella che è. Non tutti lo sanno fare», dice pronta. È davvero una bambina. Ha i capelli nero lava su un grazioso visino di porcellana.
Per essere apprezzatori, bisogna annusare alla Thomas?
«Mi serviva la rima con gonna per completare la dedica “A mia madre foresta/ a mia sorella tempesta/ a mia nonna madonna”. Poi, l’immagine è calzata bene».
Come Cento colpi di spazzola prima di andare a dormire, anche questo romanzo è autobiografico. Ha davvero tentato il suicidio?, domando.
«Molto del libro è immaginato. I sentimenti invece no. Mai pensato al suicidio, all’omicidio piuttosto», si sporge e scopre un accenno di senini della grandezza di un’albicocca.
«Chi vuole omicidiare?».«I bidelli delle medie che detestavo. Uno era pedofilo e leggeva riviste pornografiche. L’ho denunciato alla preside», si scalda.
«Si mette a fare la moralista lei che in Cento colpi di spazzola si agita come una mandrilla?».
«A scuola certe cose non si fanno. Ho denunciato pure il supplente di musica che mi ha sbattuto contro il muro e mi si è strofinato addosso».
«Embè, con tutto quello che ha fatto dopo! Corpo a corpo, sbattimenti vari. Ma l’ha scordato?», mi eccito.
«Quello l’ho voluto fare. Io ho un sesto senso per le persone squallide e morbose», dice e mi guarda con intenzione. Compare Martina Donati che cura l’immagine di Melissa. Chiede se vogliamo una bibita. Non è niente preoccupata per la sua pupilla. Prima dell’intervista mi aveva detto «È una spada. Vedrai». Vediamo.
Il suo fidanzato è il figlio dell’editore. Coincidenza?
«Ha la mia età e fa parte del mio mondo. Come succede tra le veline e i calciatori. Non mi metterei però mai con uno scrittore. Due narcisismi sono pericolosi».
Com’è nata tra voi?
«Gradualmente. Sapevamo che la gente avrebbe detto che io ero pubblicata da Fazi per questo».
Visto quanto vende, era interesse dell’editore buttarle tra le braccia il figlio.
«Forse, all’inizio ci ha pensato. Ma col mio orgoglio nulla mi fermerebbe».
Fazi non ha avuto imbarazzo a pubblicare i suoi contorcimenti col figlio?
«Il libro è autobiografico, ma con la mia scrittura diventa letteratura...».
Non esageri...
«Risparmi l’ironia. Ci sono abituata».
Cento colpi di spazzola, L’odore del tuo respiro. Titoli carnali. Rispecchiano la sua natura?
«Più che carnali, sognanti. Le principesse delle favole prima di dormire si spazzolano i capelli».
I titoli li trova lei?
«Certo. Prima nasce il titolo, poi il romanzo. Il titolo è la cosa che sento più mia».
Dicono che scriva male e che tutto sia rimpastato dall’editor.
«L’editor non rimaneggia niente. Mi dà solo consigli. Se una cosa la faccio, è perché la faccio io».
Che studi ha fatto?
«Terza liceo classico ma, causa libro, non ho avuto tempo per il diploma. Lo farò da privatista. Poi, avrò la laurea honoris causa. Aspiro al Nobel per la pace. Quello per la Letteratura, non me la daranno mai» (sorride).
La sua è una famiglia colta?
«Commercianti di scarpe. In casa non si leggeva, se non Harmony. Io invece, fin da piccola pescavo nei cesti delle fiere del mio paese, Aci Castello. Libri brutti, ma fondamentali. Ci spendevo la paghetta».
Ha idee politiche?
«Ho un’etica. Sono atea e anticlericale. Tendo sicuramente a sinistra ma, per come stanno le cose, non so dove schierarmi».
Cento colpi di spazzola ha venduto 2,5 milioni di copie in tutto il mondo.
«Trecentomila in Germania, centomila in Turchia, in Giappone, Spagna, Sud America...».
Quanto l’ha fatta ricca?
«Abbastanza da comprare una casa a Roma e da rimanere povera perché una casa a Roma costa molto. Non mi rendo conto ancora di essere ricca e famosa. Sono stata lanciata così presto...».
Per Fazi è una miniera.
«Come lui per me. Io l’ho fatto conoscere al grande pubblico. Prima era una piccola casa editrice colta».
Altri editori le stanno dietro?
«Sì. Ma anche se non può pagarmi come Mondadori, preferisco Fazi. Qui sono un essere umano. Lì sarei un prodotto».
Il primo romanzo è sesso a ogni pagina. Goduto più a farlo o a scriverne?
«Una sofferenza entrambi. Scrivendo però modellavo la realtà vissuta e la faceva più mia. È difficile guardare il proprio marcio in faccia».
Ci sguazzava per poterne scrivere?
«Non mi piace la vita regolare. Sono estrema per natura».Il mio marcio lo lascio dormire.«A me incuriosisce. Non ne ho paura, ma mi inorridisce. Scrivo per esorcizzare».
Di Cento colpi di spazzola è stato detto: «Poteva scriverlo qualsiasi battona di cavalcavia».
«Giudizi morali che non mi interessano. Mi tocca di più chi dice che non so scrivere. Vorrei poi vederla la battona. Sembra facile».
La detestano più gli uomini o le donne?
«Le donne. Si incazzano perché mostro il mio lato brutto che è anche il loro».
Quali nomi noti le hanno fatto invece riconoscimenti?
«Nessuno. Sono la persona meno riconosciuta al mondo. Il nome noto non può ammettere di leggere i miei libri. Si vergogna, li considera bassa letteratura. Ma li legge. Se no, non si spiegano tutte queste copie».
Lei è carina. Ha successo?
«Gli uomini non mi interessano più di tanto».
Sono attratti più i giovani o i maturi?
«Fino a due anni fa i maturi. Oggi, i giovani. Però prima vestivo da donna. Per distinguermi da mia mamma che faceva l’adolescente. Ora si è imborghesita e io posso vestirmi da giovane».
Perché fuma tanto?
«Sono testimonial dell’Associazione Pro fumo di Milano».
L’odore del tuo respiro vende?
«Già più di diecimila copie. È in testa alle classifiche».
Stavolta non è un libro porno. È paranoico.
«Troppo facile scrivere un bis. Ma sentimentalmente, è simile. È cupo, claustrofobico come il primo».
Si considera una scrittrice?
«Sì. So che dovrò morire presto per essere valutata. Come Gesù che fu considerato dio in terra dopo la morte precoce».
Dio ci perdoni! Lei scrive libri brevi, senza trama. Avrà lena per continuare?
«Penso di potermi evolvere molto. Ho in testa un terzo libro con una trama vera. Come il romanzo che ho scritto a nove anni. La storia di una psicologa che si innamora del paziente tossico, hanno un figlio che poi muore...».
Che allegria.
«Sono una persona molto pesante. Noi siciliani siamo teatrali».
In entrambi i libri, straparla di sperma. Un’ossessione?
«Sono attratta dall’interno del mio corpo. Penso che siamo coperti di pelle perché dentro facciamo schifo».
Ma lo sperma mica ce l’ha lei.
«Nell’uomo mi attraggono le mucose e i fluidi corporei».
