Melissa Panarello, bestselling Italian teenage sex memoirist
The New York Times recently ran a profile of Italian author Melissa Panarello, whose memoir One Hundred Strokes of the Hairbrush Before Going to Sleep has become a bestseller in Italy.
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 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 then 16-year-old in a suburb of the Sicilian city of Catania. "It's a very realistic picture," said Panarello, who turned 18 earlier this month, in an interview here on Saturday.
Plus she's brainaddlingly gorgeous. I'm in love.
