Melissa Panarello, born on December 3, 1985, is an Italian writer, also known by her alias Melissa P. Growing up in the quaint Sicilian town of Aci Castello, situated near Catania, she developed a passion for writing that would eventually lead to her remarkable literary career.
At the tender age of 17, in the year 2003, Panarello published her debut novel, "100 colpi di spazzola prima di andare a dormire," which would later be translated into English by Lawrence Venuti as "One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed" in 2004. The novel, written in diary form, delves into the narrator's extraordinary and intense sexual experiences during her teenage years, drawing heavily from the author's own life. Despite being met with harsh criticism and condemned as pornographic, the book surprisingly became a huge commercial success, selling an astonishing 900,000 copies in Italy alone, with a total of three million copies sold across more than 50 countries worldwide.
This information is based on the Wikipedia article on Melissa Panarello, licensed under CC-BY-SA, and acknowledges the contributions of all the individuals involved in the article.
