SOPHIE AIRE, THE OBSERVER

Barefoot and without make-up, Melissa Panarello is curled up on the sofa in a cluttered flat in a dark backstreet near the Colosseum. She nibbles on bread sticks, holding them as if they were cigarettes, and emits gems of worldly wisdom on her field of expertise: teenage sex.

‘I always thought sexuality was normalissimo,’ she says, swapping the breadstick for a real cigarette. ‘I don’t understand why people can’t talk about sex. If people are shocked, I can only conclude that they’ve got a problem with their sexuality.

‘All I have done is write about what really goes on,’ she says. Her dark eyes are cold and dull and she does not smile.

This 18-year-old from the Sicilian town of Catania is not glamorous, nor particularly sexy, but right now her teen porn book One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed is the hottest thing on Italian bookshelves, right up there with Pope John Paul’s latest autobiographical scribblings.

On Thursday, Melissa P’s graphically explicit, semi-autobiographical account of her 16-year-old experiments with masturbation, blowjobs and sex with five men will arrive in British bookshops, the latest in a string of startlingly matter-of-fact female literature about sex.

The book is a flow of seedy sexual encounters between the protagonist’s willing ‘Secret’ (her vagina), or her mouth, and countless demanding men.

In between classes at her home town the teenager goes seeking romance and comes home humiliated, soiled, full of shame and often in tears after willingly allowing men – and a woman at one point – to use her body and mechanically give her physical pleasure.

On her 16th birthday, Melissa ends up in a smoke-filled room above an old fishing yard, blindfolded, as five men she does not know take over her body.

‘Unexpectedly the hands became four,’ she writes in her diary, then six, then eight, then 10. ‘Five men were licking me, caressing me, setting my body on fire,’ she writes. ‘I was at the centre of attention and they did what is permitted with my body in the cell of desire.’

‘I was inert,’ she says. ‘My eyes looked down, switched off. Empty.’

When it was over, in the early hours, ‘I went home full of sperm, my make-up running. My mother was waiting asleep on the sofa. I felt invaded, soiled by strange, lumpy bodies. I brushed my hair one hundred times, like princesses do but smelling of sex.’

Sex is a series of violent, brutish experiences described like scientific observations. By the end, she finds a gentler man who tells her he really cares.

‘The sun does arrive,’ she writes. ‘Not this burning Sicilian sun, that spits flames, that starts fires, but a gentle, discreet, generous sun that gently melts the ice, making sure my dry soul is not flooded all at once.’

Melissa P’s short, crude, childish account of what she says is the ‘reality’ of modern teenage sexual exploration has sold around 900,000 copies since it came out in Italy in July 2003.

The author, who says the book is ‘90 per cent real’, has been described as a Lolita but she says she has never read Nabokov’s classic novel.

The explicit detail and detachment of the diary have fuelled debate over whether the book is a genuine contribution to taboo-breaking on female sexuality or a fraud written mainly by an older man living out adult fantasies. Italian weblogs are buzzing over whether Melissa P is a slut or a brave voice of our times.

‘I am not much of a feminist,’ she says, her child-like round face showing no expression. ‘But there is a difference between using your body to get on TV and being able to write about your sexuality.’

‘People are not used to teenagers talking about sex. It’s still shocking for many. They prefer not to know.’

‘We live in a society of hypocrites. In Catania several of my friends had to stay virgins until they got married. So, of course, they just had anal sex for years. That’s how twisted this society is.

‘But people don’t want to be told this kind of reality. They just accuse you of lying.’

Melissa, now 18, has thrived amid this debate, winning a film contract and becoming a well-known face on European TV and magazine covers. She says she received hundreds of emails from apologetic men and young women who identify themselves with the scenes she describes.

She hid her identity when the book first came out. But the veil soon fell and now she is an icon of modern Italian youth culture. Melissa claims her parents, who split up recently, were proud of her literary success once they got over the initial shock.

But she does not see them as part of her life. ‘I never really felt at home in my family,’ she says. ‘I always wanted to leave.’

Last January, as the book took off, she dropped out of school and moved to Rome ‘to live a bit’. ‘It got too difficult to juggle interviews and homework,’ she says. ‘And the teachers couldn’t stand me. Some of them would not speak to me and others told me I was trash.’

Now she is cushioned by her book money from the financial ups and downs of her parents’ clothes shop in Catania.

‘I don’t see why you care what they think of my book,’ she says, dismissing the fact that the extreme sexual experiences she describes, a minor’s love life with older men, were hidden in her typically Italian Catholic home.

In the Rome apartment where Melissa now lives with her publisher boyfriend, making interviewers wait hours, Melissa says she has grown out of her phase of trying out sleazy older men.

She dismisses suggestions that she might be a one-book wonder or just a timely example of a generation of teenagers exploring sexual extremes and leaving love for later.

Melissa is working on her next book, which she says is due out next year. It is about a loving relationship ruined by jealousy. The title is The Smell of Your Breath.

THE NEW YORK OBSERVER

100 Strokes of the Brush

Before Bed, by Melissa Panarello, Grove Press, 176 pages, $22.

Contrary to what you might expect, 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed has almost nothing to do with hair-maintenance. The artfully obscured young thing on the cover of this book (she’s brushing a chunk of hair across her face) is the author and protagonist—or heroine, as she would no doubt prefer—of an X-rated fairy tale. Her name was Melissa P.; recently, she’s added a few more syllables to achieve Melissa Panarello. No longer artfully obscured, she’s regularly captured on camera spreading her milky thighs in a stiletto-boot-and-short-skirt ensemble, not quite concealing her knickers, or the modest teenage bosom spilling out of her Versace corset. Occasionally, she’s wearing a necklace with the words “Eat Me” on it, or smoking a cigarillo. Her doughy little face betrays little: She’s not frightened like a child, lascivious like a nymphomaniac or knowing like some media-savvy Lolita, although she’s been accused of being all three. Her face traffics in only one peculiarly modern commodity: adolescent ennui verging on disgust.

The erotic-chronicle epidemic has swept the globe, from France’s Catherine M. to our very own Jane J(uska), Japan’s Hitomi K(anehari) and Spain’s Valerie T(asso). Ms. Panarello is the Italian model, a porn principessa, the crucial difference being that Melissa P. is only 18, and was only 16 at the time of the events recounted in her book.

In Italy, her book has managed to sell nearly a million copies and remain on the best-seller list since its release last summer. She has become a national celebrity, appearing regularly on television and in magazines. Further book deals have been signed and there’s talk of feature films. In short, Melissa P. has become an icon of Italian youth culture.

But is her story emblematic?

The dull Sicilian suburb of Catania, where she scoots around on her scooter and lives above the mid-range clothing shop her parents own, is not enough to contain the worldly aspirations of Melissa P. She feels terribly misunderstood, particularly by her parents and teachers. In order to empower herself, young Meli starts keeping a diary and having oodles of sex: “At sixteen I’m mistress of my actions.” There’s plenty of fellatio; weekly sessions of gang rape, during which she wears over-knee stockings and five young men use their “lances” and “members” to “unload their whitish liquid on [her]”; a spot of S&M with an older man, whom she does with a dildo and leaves; a few ménages à trois; sex with a transsexual; sex with a lesbian; endless accounts of masturbation (she regularly “slips her fingers” into her “Secret”—in a moment of poetic magnificence, her widely shared “Secret” becomes her “foaming waves”); and an orgy.

And yet Meli is a dutiful girl. One hardly knows when she finds the time to do her homework, let alone brush her hair—100 strokes per night. Her mother taught her that to be a princess, one must brush away, and Meli really is a princess—though no one seems to recognize it.

Her insights are profound: “Who cares if it was right or wrong? The important thing is that we felt good, we lived deeply.” Who cares about AIDS or pregnancy? One wonders whether life is really so footloose and fancy-free in Sicily.

In fact, Meli feels dirty and ashamed after she strips off her over-knees and finds that she can’t quite get rid of that extracurricular stench: “I am dirty; only Love, if it exists, can cleanse me again.” But she hasn’t found Love despite all her carnal adventures. Near the end of her quest, she takes another peek at her tattered soul and finds that living “deeply” is not the key: “No, the fact is that nobody ever taught me how to express the love I kept hidden inside, concealed from everyone.” Then she meets a special boy, a liberator. Here she finds her voice and expresses her fervent gratitude: “[W]hen we are with you, in your arms, my panties and I are free of any impediment, any chains.” Melissa P. is not just a princess, but a bona fide wordsmith.

Forget the book—let’s take a look at how Meli became a best-selling author. She sent her diary to a few publishers via e-mail. Simone Caltabelotta, an editor with Fazi Editore (who is now—big surprise—Ms. Panarello’s boyfriend), read the manuscript and decided that with a little rewriting (or perhaps a great deal), it was publishable.

Sex sells. The book flew off the shelves in several European and Latin American countries; it’s been translated into most modern languages. Morgan Entrekin, president of Grove/Atlantic, has deemed it worthy of sharing sentence space with Henry Miller and D.H. Lawrence. Ms. Panarello—who, to judge by her facial expression, finds all this terribly dull and not at all scandalous—says she would like to see her book reverberate beyond sexual boundaries. It’s really about growing up in a dangerous world, she claims, though “the dangerous world” doesn’t get much play in between lances, members, secrets and brush strokes.

Ms. Panarello has been praised for her courage and honesty, but in fact her book is sentimental, coy and crass. It’s simultaneously clinical and euphemistic, because the author (or perhaps it’s her publisher) can’t decide what she wants. So what we get is a sequence of “ Penthouse Forum”–style fantasies mixed up with a whimper of adolescent angst and a handful of fairy dust.

© Moira McPartlin
Reproduced with permission

‘The Scent of Your Breath’ is described on its cover blurb as the sequel to ‘One Hundred Strokes Before Bed’. The debut is the fictional memoir of a teenage girl searching for love and prepared to do anything to find it, the sequel finds the teenager now a famous writer living in Rome with her kind compassionate lover, Thomas.

Told in the form of a dialogue to her mother, one would have expected this sequel to be a happier tale with the young girl at last at peace with her sexuality and content with her success and the wonderful lover who now shares her life. But this is not to be.

In this skimpy 118 page novel, the reader is taken through a confusing angst filled account of a girl’s life. She is portrayed as wise, yet still a child and emotionally disturbed enough to see and hear traumatised beings from another place. Her partner patiently deals with her inconsistent sexual demands and displays of passion, love and loathing. And all the while she shares their most intimate moments with her mother who the teenager addresses in an adoring and obsessive manner.

The chapters are short choppy pieces which flick back and forth through the deluded girls memories of childhood events and past affairs with faceless, nameless men. She often hints at incestuous abuse but refuses to let the reader in on the truth which is where the book fails and veers towards self indulgence.

As the story progresses the main character slips between reality and fantasy. Ghostly visitations encourage her self destructive behaviour and eventual mental breakdown and attempted suicide. Mental illness in young girls is not an original theme and near the end of the novel the similarities with Plath’s ‘The Bell Jar’ are hard to ignore.

The language in the novel is beautiful and poetic; it could almost be described as a narrative poem. But this poetic quality often leads the reader into dark corners, fumbling to find a deeper meaning in the prose. There are also a number of chapters which appear contrived and have no obvious relation to the narrative, for example one where the heroine refuses drugs could have been left out without harm to the overall effect.

However it is the rich language and stunning imagery that makes this book enjoyable to read, but although the writer has great poetic flare, the naïve style and contradictions prevents this becoming the masterpiece Plath produced.

Although I felt no pathos towards the main character, I did applaud one of the author’s acknowledgements at the end of this short book were she thanks – ‘all who hate me, because it’s thanks to them I love myself all the more.’

FRANK BRUNI, NEW YORK TIMES

Edit the story just a bit, and it becomes a heartwarming tale of early ambition and unpredictable success.

A teenage girl from a nowhere town pours her heart into prose. A risk-taking publisher turns that prose into a book. It outsells almost everything else in Italy, making its author famous.

That is an accurate enough account of what has happened to Melissa Panarello, but not a full one. It omits a few crucial details, starting with her subject matter: the erotic adventures of a sexually ravenous girl who caroms between younger and older men, homosexuality and sadomasochism.

It also fails to note that Miss Panarello and her publisher are marketing her book as thinly veiled autobiography. She claims that everything in it mirrors her experiences as a 15- and 16-year-old in a suburb of the small Sicilian city of Catania.

”It’s a very realistic picture,” said Miss Panarello, who turned 18 earlier this month, in an interview here on Saturday.

She conceded one significant alteration, beyond the protection of her sexual partners’ identities.

”The experiences in reality happened in less than a year, even though the book talks of them happening in two years,” she said with a seemingly studied matter-of-factness that left no room for embarrassment or boastfulness.

That chilly bluntness matches the tone of ”One Hundred Strokes of the Hairbrush Before Going to Sleep,” a 143-page wisp of a book that has had a wallop of an impact.

Since its publication in July, it has sold about 500,000 copies in Italy — an astonishing figure in a country with about 57 million people — and remains near or at the top of the nation’s best-seller lists.

It has also generated extensive discussion and a bevy of questions.

Do teenagers really have such experiences? Did Miss Panarello? Is the book a soul-scraping confession, written solely by her, or a savvy publicity stunt, initiated and abetted by others?

Miss Panarello and Simone Caltabellota, her editor at Fazi Editore, which published the book, said they never anticipated her success or did anything special to engineer it, even if the rollout of the book came to seem like an act of marketing genius.

When it was first published, under the name ”Melissa P.,” Miss Panarello would not pose for photographs that showed her face and would not allow her last name to be mentioned, citing the fact that she was not yet 18.

One of the first Italian publications to interview her had to do so by e-mail.

But in September, she began making carefully chosen television appearances. By the time of her 18th birthday, she had already jettisoned just about every last bit of reserve, and is now close to ubiquitous.

She said in the interview that she had not wanted to step out so soon but felt forced to do so by commentary that questioned whether there was a real person behind the book.

”There was a pride of authorship,” she said as she reclined on a worn leather sofa in the apartment of the book’s publicist. There was a spent cigarette in the ashtray in front of her, but she said it was not hers.

”I only smoke cigars,” she said.

The title of the book refers to a kind of purging ritual that the book’s narrator, also named Melissa, performs after she is prodded by one of her sexual partners into having sex with him and four other men at the same time. That happens on her 16th birthday.

It follows and precedes many other sexual encounters, sometimes arranged on the Internet and often recounted in near clinical detail.

Miss Panarello is from Acicastello, just outside Catania. She said that her father and mother sold clothes and shoes, and that she had a younger sister.

She said that while she had never been much of a student, she has long been a fan of erotic literature and sent some of her earlier writing to erotic Internet sites.

She said she spent a lot of time online, which meant she had to sit in the family’s garage, where the only computer was.

”My mother did not want it in the house,” Miss Panarello said, still strangely deadpan. ”She believed that it was an instrument of the devil.”

Her parents had no idea what she was doing or writing, she said, until her mother read a computer printout of the first draft of the book and promptly threw it in the trash.

Miss Panarello said she had to threaten to go to a lawyer before her parents agreed to let the book be published. She needed their permission because of her age.

Mr. Caltabellota said Fazi, a small, independent house, was one of the few publishers — among dozens to which she sent her draft — that saw merit in it.

”I felt something,” Mr. Caltabellota said of his reaction upon reading it.

At that point, he said, only bits of the narrative were written as a diary, and he asked Miss Panarello to put all of the narrative in that form.

But, he added, ”She wrote every word, every comma.”

Several Italian journalists have expressed skepticism about that. Literary critics have alternately expressed admiration for, and revulsion at, the end result.

Readers have simply devoured it.

”The public loves these kinds of things,” said Luciano Pellicani, an Italian sociologist, adding that beyond the subject matter and seemingly cunning introduction of the book, there was no special, Italy-specific explanation for its success.

In fact, publishing rights for it have been purchased in about a dozen countries, including the United States, where an English translation is scheduled for release next fall by Grove/Atlantic.

Grove was also the American publisher of ”The Sexual Life of Catherine M.,” a best-selling memoir to which Miss Panarello’s book clearly owes a debt.

”One Hundred Strokes” has obviously changed her life. She said she was planning to move away from Sicily, which bores her, and had already stopped going to her high school there.

”The obligations of the book do not leave me much time,” she said, adding that she also had problems with her teachers after the book’s release.

”It wasn’t only because they thought the book was scandalous,” she said. ”It was also the envy. You know, those teachers are the most frustrated people in the world.”SOPHIE ARIE, THE GUARDIAN

Barefoot and without make-up, Melissa Panarello is curled up on the sofa in a cluttered flat in a dark backstreet near the Colosseum. She nibbles on bread sticks, holding them as if they were cigarettes, and emits gems of worldly wisdom on her field of expertise: teenage sex.

‘I always thought sexuality was normalissimo,’ she says, swapping the breadstick for a real cigarette. ‘I don’t understand why people can’t talk about sex. If people are shocked, I can only conclude that they’ve got a problem with their sexuality.

‘All I have done is write about what really goes on,’ she says. Her dark eyes are cold and dull and she does not smile.

This 18-year-old from the Sicilian town of Catania is not glamorous, nor particularly sexy, but right now her teen porn book One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed is the hottest thing on Italian bookshelves, right up there with Pope John Paul’s latest autobiographical scribblings.

On Thursday, Melissa P’s graphically explicit, semi-autobiographical account of her 16-year-old experiments with masturbation, blowjobs and sex with five men will arrive in British bookshops, the latest in a string of startlingly matter-of-fact female literature about sex.

The book is a flow of seedy sexual encounters between the protagonist’s willing ‘Secret’ (her vagina), or her mouth, and countless demanding men.

In between classes at her home town the teenager goes seeking romance and comes home humiliated, soiled, full of shame and often in tears after willingly allowing men – and a woman at one point – to use her body and mechanically give her physical pleasure.

On her 16th birthday, Melissa ends up in a smoke-filled room above an old fishing yard, blindfolded, as five men she does not know take over her body.

‘Unexpectedly the hands became four,’ she writes in her diary, then six, then eight, then 10. ‘Five men were licking me, caressing me, setting my body on fire,’ she writes. ‘I was at the centre of attention and they did what is permitted with my body in the cell of desire.’

‘I was inert,’ she says. ‘My eyes looked down, switched off. Empty.’

When it was over, in the early hours, ‘I went home full of sperm, my make-up running. My mother was waiting asleep on the sofa. I felt invaded, soiled by strange, lumpy bodies. I brushed my hair one hundred times, like princesses do but smelling of sex.’

Sex is a series of violent, brutish experiences described like scientific observations. By the end, she finds a gentler man who tells her he really cares.

‘The sun does arrive,’ she writes. ‘Not this burning Sicilian sun, that spits flames, that starts fires, but a gentle, discreet, generous sun that gently melts the ice, making sure my dry soul is not flooded all at once.’

Melissa P’s short, crude, childish account of what she says is the ‘reality’ of modern teenage sexual exploration has sold around 900,000 copies since it came out in Italy in July 2003.

The author, who says the book is ‘90 per cent real’, has been described as a Lolita but she says she has never read Nabokov’s classic novel.

The explicit detail and detachment of the diary have fuelled debate over whether the book is a genuine contribution to taboo-breaking on female sexuality or a fraud written mainly by an older man living out adult fantasies. Italian weblogs are buzzing over whether Melissa P is a slut or a brave voice of our times.

‘I am not much of a feminist,’ she says, her child-like round face showing no expression. ‘But there is a difference between using your body to get on TV and being able to write about your sexuality.’

‘People are not used to teenagers talking about sex. It’s still shocking for many. They prefer not to know.’

‘We live in a society of hypocrites. In Catania several of my friends had to stay virgins until they got married. So, of course, they just had anal sex for years. That’s how twisted this society is.

‘But people don’t want to be told this kind of reality. They just accuse you of lying.’

Melissa, now 18, has thrived amid this debate, winning a film contract and becoming a well-known face on European TV and magazine covers. She says she received hundreds of emails from apologetic men and young women who identify themselves with the scenes she describes.

She hid her identity when the book first came out. But the veil soon fell and now she is an icon of modern Italian youth culture. Melissa claims her parents, who split up recently, were proud of her literary success once they got over the initial shock.

But she does not see them as part of her life. ‘I never really felt at home in my family,’ she says. ‘I always wanted to leave.’

Last January, as the book took off, she dropped out of school and moved to Rome ‘to live a bit’. ‘It got too difficult to juggle interviews and homework,’ she says. ‘And the teachers couldn’t stand me. Some of them would not speak to me and others told me I was trash.’

Now she is cushioned by her book money from the financial ups and downs of her parents’ clothes shop in Catania.

‘I don’t see why you care what they think of my book,’ she says, dismissing the fact that the extreme sexual experiences she describes, a minor’s love life with older men, were hidden in her typically Italian Catholic home.

In the Rome apartment where Melissa now lives with her publisher boyfriend, making interviewers wait hours, Melissa says she has grown out of her phase of trying out sleazy older men.

She dismisses suggestions that she might be a one-book wonder or just a timely example of a generation of teenagers exploring sexual extremes and leaving love for later.

Melissa is working on her next book, which she says is due out next year. It is about a loving relationship ruined by jealousy. The title is The Smell of Your Breath.

NERVE.COM

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.

INTERVISTA DI PATRIZIO LONGO

Melissa P. Al telefono per raccontare la nuova esperienza editoriale.

Mi da subito l’impressione di una persona estremamente sensibile. La nostra conversazione inizia con una domanda base. Se le piace quando le danno l’etichetta di “personaggio”. Molto sinceramente mi risponde No.

Successivamente si parla di Melissa da bambina, dei giochi, delle scelte…

Risponde di essere stata una bimba solitaria, taciturna, di aver fotto giochi “strani” come la psicologa. Inoltre racconta anche della sua amica “virtuale” il suo Alter-Ego – Lucia.

Ripercorriamo alcuni scritti che sembrano rappresentare una sorta di porta che l’Autrice interpone fra sè¨ e le relazioni esterne. Il Media per esprimere le proprie emozioni. Non mancano riflessioni sui temi affrontati da Melissa nel suo ultimo libro “Nel nome dell’Amore” (2006 – Fazi Editore). Afferma che i veti e le questiono affrontate hanno subito una sorta di censura da parte della Chiesa. Mi dice «mancano certezze nella società odierna, quelle conquistate».

Il focus viene spostato al suo blog in internet. Non è dipendente ha un rapporto «formale, non mi faccio ingoiare.». Rispetto ai suoi lettori chiedo come mai esista una scissione così netta fra chi si identifica nelle domande dell’Autrice e chi invece più conservatore le punta ill dito contro. «Sono molto felice di questa realtà. C’è chi s’identifica nei miei scritti chi No. Chi afferma che è un’opera pornografica, un’operazione di marketing… L’importante è prendere posizione. Viviamo in un’Italia divisa. Due menti, due cuori, due… La missione del libro afferma Melissa non è la risposta dal Cardinale ma far riflettere il lettore su argomenti spesso censurati solo per ragioni puramente di costume.

”Melissa P.”, personaggio molto controverso. Ti piace quando ti si chiama “personaggio”?

Sinceramente no, io sono abituata a vedermi come persona, sono gli altri che mi vedono come personaggio!

Melissa Panarello. Mi piacerebbe fare una fotografia della tua vita prima che tu diventassi “Melissa P.”?

Ero una bambina molto solitaria, giocavo molto spesso da sola – anche perché al tempo ero ancora figlia unica – ad avevo, come molti bambini, una amichetta immaginaria: la mia si chiamava Lucia e con lei facevo giochi un po’ strani: la psicologa, l’agente immobiliare… dai 5 anni in poi il mio passatempo preferito è stato scrivere.

La tua prima pubblicazione, “100 colpi di spazzola prima di andare a dormire” è un diario che possiamo dire rappresenti la tua porta di comunicazione con il mondo…?

Tutto ciò che scrivo rappresenta una porta di comunicazione con il mondo. La scrittura mi è sempre servita come binario per esprimere me stessa, i miei bisogni, le mie urgenze. Ci sono stati molti esempi prima di “100 colpi”, mai pubblicati, che mi sono sempre serviti per esprimere il “disagio” cui non sono più riuscita a dare un nome ma che mi sento dentro; la scrittura mi serve a tirare fuori tutto ciò che mi inquieta.

Tu hai definito il tuo modo di scrivere molto lontano da quello della Fallaci (che veniva subito dopo di te nelle classifiche di vendita). Perché questa distanza così netta?

Oltre al modo di scrivere, di cui ciascuno ha il suo, io mi riferivo soprattutto alle idee politiche, che non condivido affatto. Quando mi si chiede se mi riconosco in Oriana Fallaci posso solo dire di no.

Quanto Melissa P. è una persona sola?

Mah, all’inizio questa solitudine mi dava un po’ fastidio… il non amare la vita mondana, uscire con gli amici… poi ho capito che sto meglio a casa, nel mio mondo, e quindi non ne devo soffrire.

Tu dici spesso “è come se fossi morta e poi rinata”…?

Dicevo spesso a mia madre: “Guarda, a 17 anni forse morirò:” e lei si inquietava molto. Io credo che non si nasca quando si nasce biologicamente, ma quando si acquisisce una propria identità e si è coscienti di se stessi: a me questo è successo a 17 anni! Sono stata una veggente in questo caso, però è successo!

Sei nata a Catania e vivi a Roma. Ti viene mai il desiderio di tornare indietro?

Quello che mi manca non è la città in sé, ma la condizione umana che si trova in un paese piccolo e non in una città grande. A Roma mi sento in una condizione un po’ disumana, perché l’individuo singolo non viene molto preso in considerazione.

”In nome dell’amore”, la tua nuova pubblicazione, è una lettera aperta al cardinale Camillo Ruini, un personaggio importante del mondo eccelsiastico…?

…e non solo! Un personaggio importante anche nello stato italiano. Non si può vivere n uno stato laico in cui la chiesa interviene sempre sulle questioni che dovrebbero riguardare esclusivamente i cittadini. La motivazione della lettera aperta è la condizione di una ventenne come me che sente minacciata la propria libertà di scelta. Qui non si parla solo di idee del cardinale Ruini o delle idee cattoliche – rispettabilissime e che non intendo mettere in discussione – si parla del fatto che queste idee vadano ad intaccare la struttura di uno stato e la sua legislatura. La decisione di rivolgergli delle domande – perché è appunto questo che faccio nel libro – nasce da questo disagio.

Sono domande che fanno riferimento a problemi molto discussi della società contemporanea: omosessualità, matrimonio, aborto, divorzio…?

Prima c’erano più certezze: non si discuteva della legge 194, della pillola abortiva, dei pacs… Dalla morte di Papa Giovanni Paolo II la chiesa ha cominciato ad ingerire pesantemente su questi temi

Il tuo blog è molto attivo, un’altra “porta di comunicazione” attraverso cui manifestare i tuoi pensieri?

Con internet ho un rapporto molto formale e molto discreto. Non lo uso come un mezzo onnipotente e lo uso con molta oculatezza. Il mio blog non è molto aggiornato, scrivo di tanto in tanto, però è molto seguito. Ho dovuto chiudere i commenti perché i rancori, gli odi ed il disprezzo di alcuni miei lettori si riversavano tutti lì e non era quello il punto cui volevo arrivare.

C’è chi ti ama e chi ti odia?

Io sono molto contenta di questa scissione netta di opinioni perché quando un libro ed il suo autore provoca tanta divisione vuol dire che ha fatto qualcosa di buono. Non avrei preferito stare nel mezzo, è una cosa che odio. L’Italia ha due teste, due cuori, due anime e anzi ne ha molte di più. Nei confronti del mio libro c’è chi ci si è ritrovato, magari non come esperienze ma come stato d’animo, e c’è chi invece – magari senza averlo letto – lo ha classificato immediatamente come opera pornografica, opera falsa, come un’operazione di marketing. Questa divisione l’abbiamo vista con le recenti elezioni.

In un senso o nell’altro purché se ne parli?

No, non sono di questo avviso. Non voglio assolutamente la fama ad ogni costo. Non lo reputo necessario né per la mia persona né per la mia professione.

Pensi che il cardinale ti risponderà?

Non penso proprio, metterebbe in discussione secoli e secoli di dogmi cattolici. Abbiamo visto ultimamente le dichiarazioni del cardinale Martini, sulle quali la chiesa non si è esposta; non si sa da che parte stia. Se la chiesa non risponde a Martini, figuriamoci a me! Ma il libro non è rivolto solo a Ruini, è rivolto a tutte le persone che la pensano come lui: nei loro confronti, e soprattutto nei confronti delle nuove generazioni – chi ha 50 o 60 anni ha oramai il proprio vissuto, ed è un po’ più duro da smuovere – che devono ancora formarsi e possono riflettere su questi temi, penso che il libro possa fare del bene.

Qual’è la cosa che ti ha emozionato di più del tuo libro?

Le dichiarazioni del cardinale Ruini mi hanno emozionato. In negativo.

Grazie per esser stata in EXTRANET

Grazie a voi….

THREE MONKEYS

But then or now, decent underwear or none, wild women never could hide their innocence – a kind of pity kitty hopefulness that their prince was on his way. Especially the tough ones with their box cutters and dirty language, or the glossy ones with two-seated cars and a pocket-book full of dope. Even the ones who wear scars like presidential medals and stockings rolled at their ankles can’t hide the sugar-child, the winsome baby girl curled up somewhere inside, between the ribs, say, or under the heart”
Toni Morrison, Love

[N.d.T.: Ma sia allora che ora, a prescindere dalla decenza della loro biancheria intima, le donne selvagge mai hanno potuto nascondere la loro ingenuità – quella specie di speranza patetica che il loro principe azzurro dovesse arrivare da un momento all’altro. Specialmente le più dure, quelle con i serramanico e le parolacce, o magari le raffinate con le auto sportive e le tasche piene di droga. Persino quelle che esibiscono le loro cicatrici come fossero medaglie presidenziali, con le autoreggenti a livello delle caviglie, non riescono a nascondere quella bambina dolce ed innocente che trova rifugio al loro interno, dentro al loro cuore]

A Melissa Panarello non piace come suona ‘diciannove’, gli anni che ha appena compiuto. Non che faccia alcuna differenza, come dice lei stessa: in Italia dopo la pubblicazione del suo primo libro, Cento colpi di spazzola prima di andare a dormire, chiunque, appena la sente nominare, conosce esattamente la sua età. La sua età infatti ha rappresentato il fulcro della discussione al momento della pubblicazione del suo libro. La Panarello non si è certo stupita dello scandalo [provocato], quando fu pubblicato il libro, con i suoi racconti dettagliati di vari incontri sessuali: “Sicuramente la lettura superficiale a cui è stato sottoposto il mio libro non mi ha resa proprio felice. Ma quella che hanno preso i critici e i giornali è stata la strada più facile: parlare cioè di sesso in modo scandalistico e totalizzante, come se le esperienze sessuali fossero le uniche cose interessanti nel romanzo”.

Pare un po’ ingenuo da parte di Melissa il suggerire che i critici si siano soffermati su dettagli di secondo piano. Non fatevi ingannare, il sesso è al centro della scena, ed è un tipo di sesso completamente privato di qualsiasi alone romantico, che può impressionare se proviene da una donna matura, tanto più se viene da una ragazzina. Lei però non ha dubbi sulle proprie intenzioni, e non accetta confronti ad esempio con il libro di Catherine Millet La vita sessuale di Catherine M., solo per il fatto che anche questo rappresenti un ritratto del sesso: “L’ho letto e non mi è piaciuto. Non credo al sesso intellettuale, filosofico. Credo che il sesso sia carne e sangue. E il paragone non potrebbe essere più sbagliato e forzato: la Millet ha cinquantanni, io diciotto, proveniamo da mondi diversi, abbiamo menti diverse. E lei è anche più brutta di me”. Ma allora, il suo libro può essere definito letteratura o pornografia, l’una definizione esclude l’altra? “Prima di tutto penso che sia la pornografia sia l’erotismo possano benissimo essere opere letterarie. Facciamo un esempio: prendiamo Opus pistorum di Henry Miller e confrontiamolo con Una spia nella casa dell’amore di Anaïs Nin. Indubbiamente, entrambe sono opere letterarie ( e con questo intendo Letteratura con la L maiuscola) eppure sembrano divise da questo confine che pare grandissimo che differenzia pornografia da erotismo. Nella pornografia io vi trovo sincerità (non nell’accezione comune, ‘lealtà’) e purezza di intenti. Nell’erotismo vi è mistero e gioco. La pornografia è in atto, l’erotismo è in pensiero. E non è neanche detto che tutto ciò che è pornografico sia anche superficiale e volgare: quando la pornografia ha un’idea dietro può essere profonda e introspettiva quanto qualsiasi altra opera”. L’uso del termine ‘introspettivo’ rappresenta uno spunto interessante, in quanto il suo libro sicuramente introspettivo è. Il diario copre il periodo dal luglio 2000 all’agosto 2002. Leggendo il libro si può addirittura arrivare a pensare che niente di interessante sia successo nel mondo, a parte il risveglio sessuale di Melissa. L’unica intromissione del mondo esterno è una menzione marginale a proposito dell’11 di settembre: “Forse Daniele sta guardando le stesse immagini alla tv”. [Melissa] concorda che il libro sia introspettivo e spiega, fuori dai denti, “sono una terribile narcisista, i critici dovrebbero saperlo”. Ma l’introspezione consiste in qualcosa di più della semplice vanità: “L’unico mondo a cui il lettore può accedere è quello di Melissa, tutti gli altri mondi sono irreali e lontani, soltanto echi disturbanti nella realtà privata”. La critica si è molto concentrata sui dettagli autobiografici del libro. Addirittura in Italia si è speculato insistentemente che Melissa non abbia effettivamente scritto il libro, ma che esso sia opera di qualcuno più anziano e smaliziato. Il dibattito è da considerarsi come mimino semplicistico, e pare derivare più da una incapacità di ammettere che una ragazzina potesse vivere delle esperienze così squallide che da una seria analisi di tipo stilistico. Una conseguenza l’ha avuta però, quella di spingere la Panarello ad una difesa ad oltranza delle proprie esperienze. Il libro è stato descritto come un’autobiografia romanzata, ma se si finisce per difendere a spada tratta la veridicità delle esperienze, non si corre il rischio minimizzare l’input immaginativo di una scrittrice? “Anche se le mie sono esperienze reali – si difende – non posso certo nascondere che l’immaginazione non abbia giocato un ruolo importante. Se scrivi senza immaginazione, il risultato non è un romanzo, ma una cronaca giornalistica priva di emozioni e spunti creativi.”. Poi continua, “ci sono due tipi di esperienze: quella reale e quella virtuale. Tutti gli autori, di qualsiasi genere, parlano di entrambe le esperienze.”. Il suo prossimo libro, in via di ultimazione, in quanto lavoro di fantasia rappresenterà, nonostante Melissa non voglia ammetterlo, un tentativo di mettere a tacere le critiche che il suo diario-romanzo aveva sollevato. “Questo secondo libro si basa sull’esperienza virtuale, quindi è autobiografico solo virtualmente, spiritualmente, e non fisicamente – spiega con chiaro entusiasmo. E prosegue – è una storia d’amore molto nera, con tratti cupi e claustrofobici. La protagonista vive di ossessioni, è convinta di vedere fantasmi, parla con gli insetti credendo che siano donne malvagie pronte e portare via il suo ragazzo”. Aggiunge poi una nota intrigante: “la protagonista si chiamerà Melissa e il libro è una lettera indirizzata alla madre”. In Cento colpi di spazzola prima di andare a dormire , Melissa diventa un oggetto sessuale per un certo numero di uomini che se la passano (letteralmente, in una scena particolarmente sgradevole) dall’uno all’altro per puro piacere personale. Il libro si esplica in una serie di strati sovrastanti e provoca diverse riflessioni sul tema del sesso e dell’identità personale, del tipo: quanto il degrado cui va incontro il suo corpo corrisponde ad un degrado della sua personalità? Dipinge in altre parole un quadro complesso degli intrighi e delle individualità legati al sesso. Quando le chiediamo se si considera una femminista, [Melissa] risponde categorica “no, anzi. Sono una maschilista pura, una paladina del mondo maschile così bistrattato, incompreso e, allo stesso tempo, invidiato da quelle donne che non hanno la reale concezione della parola ‘libertà’”. La Panarello ti ricorda spesso una giovane Johnny Rotten del mondo letterario: intelligente, riflessiva, ma anche pronta alla provocazione non appena ne scorga la possibilità. E’ cauta riguardo alle proprie influenze letterarie: “Non ho modelli letterari. Un libro deve aprirti gli orizzonti, non aiutarti né supportarti, – spiega – mi piace un libro per quello che è, per quello che mi può dare in termini emotivi, non in termini ‘tecnici’”.

Non appena ne ha avuto l’opportunità, dopo l’uscita di Cento colpi di spazzola prima di andare a dormire , Melissa si è trasferita dal paesino siciliano di Aci Castello a Roma, dove vive attualmente. Quello di essere ambientato in un paese relativamente piccolo è un elemento fondamentale del suo primo libro, in un paesino dove i pettegolezzi si diffondono velocemente, e altrettanto velocemente si viene etichettati. Fino a che punto il fatto di essere cresciuta in Sicilia ha contribuito alla stesura del libro, o in altre parole, avrebbe potuto scrivere lo stesso libro a Roma o Milano? “Forse no, forse sì, – è la sua risposta ambivalente – non lo so. Sicuramente la Sicilia influenza, senza dubbio. E lo fa positivamente e negativamente. La Sicilia è un terra estrema dove non esistono vie di mezzo e tutto ciò ha influenzato me e la mia scrittura”. La reazione al libro in Sicilia è stata particolarmente feroce: “La Sicilia ti dà tanto – ci dice – ma si porta via il doppio di ciò che ti ha regalato”.

Il libro non è solamente un bestseller tradotto in diverse lingue, ma ora diventa una trasposizione cinematografica. Probabilmente più che in altri casi, ci si domanda quanto questa sarà fedele all’originale. “Non partecipo in alcun modo alla realizzazione del film – a parte averne venduto i diritti, si potrebbe obbiettare – poiché il progetto steso dalla produzione non mi convince e non mi piace”. Bisogna ammettere che il libro sia alquanto ‘cinematico’ o come dice lei stessa, “praticamente una sceneggiatura già scritta”. Stupisce quindi che la scrittrice siciliana commenti: “la produzione si è messa in testa di riscriverlo togliendo, in questo modo, l’atmosfera che caratterizza il libro e modificando in maniera quasi radicale la storia”. Tutto ciò illustra a meraviglia uno degli scomodi paradossi sollevati dal libro, dalla sua atmosfera e trama. Se gli sceneggiatori dovessero lasciarlo così com’è, il film verrebbe vietato ai minori, ovvero non sarebbe proiettabile ad una platea di cotanei della protagonista.

Lasceremo che sia il team di recensori di Three Monkeys a decidere se il libro debba essere considerato un’opera letteraria o se invece debba essere etichettato come pornografia schietta. Quello che non è materia di contendere è invece l’enorme successo che ha accompagnato il debutto di Melissa P. e che ha preparato i riflettori per il seguito. Ci sono molti che sono pronti a sostenere che il successo è dovuto semplicemente alla componente scandalistica e all’età dell’autrice. Ci sono però sufficienti elementi che suggeriscono che la Panarello li sconfesserà e a diritto prenderà posto nella rosa dei nuovi talenti ‘letterari’ italiani. L’indignazione moralistica ha raramente rappresentato una buona unità di misura per giudicare opere d’arte, siano esse letterarie o musicali. Il sottoscritto, per fare un esempio, aspetta con ansia il prossimo libro di Melissa Panarello.