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,”
The title of the book [“One Hundred Strokes of the Hairbrush Before Going to Sleep”]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.