Melissa P. - Overview

Panarello grew up in the small Sicilian town of Aci Castello, near Catania. In 2003, aged 17, she published her debut novel, "100 colpi di spazzola prima di andare a dormire" (translated into English by Lawrence Venuti as "One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed", 2004). The novel, written in diary form, focuses on the narrator's extreme sexual life during her teenage years and is loosely based on the author's own experiences. Despite being critically-reviled and denounced as pornographic, the book became a best-seller, selling over 900,000 copies in Italy alone — for a total of three million copies in over 50 countries.

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