The Woman’s Encyclopedia
Amanda. A name, a destiny. She is Neapolitan, quick-witted, energetic, sophisticated – and she doesn’t want to miss out on anything destiny has in store for her. Especially in bed. A feisty and deeply joyful story about the world’s oldest art form: sex.
L’Enciclopedia della donna – which was published in weekly installments during the 1960s in Italy – presented, clearly and authoritatively, everything a woman was sup- posed to know: from nutrition to sports, from the rules to become an impeccable host- ess to the rules to impose on one’s children.
Only one topic was missing; one single subject was never dealt with, even though it was at the center of every woman’s life and body: her pussy. A not insignificant oversight, which Amanda – a respected professor of architecture, 52 years old and lots of things to explain – immediately prepares to put to rights, recounting it from A to Z.
“The first date with a man? It’s a mess, you have to take it very slowly otherwise they get scared”. Amanda has very clear ideas on the subject: “Men and women like the same thing: to make love, to touch each other, to kiss, to come”.
By demolishing the conventions one by one, in one hundred pages Valeria Parrella gives us the facts, the way they are. A declaration of freedom consigned to women (and to those who love them), an invitation for them to take what they want, in all the open and closed rooms of their life.
“I’d like to tell them, look in your hands, girls, only in your hands. Everything you need is inside there”.
VALERIA PARRELLA was born in 1974
and lives in Naples. She has published the collections of short stories mosca piú balena (minimum fax 2003), Per grazia ricevuta (minimum fax 2005) and Troppa importanza all’amore (Einaudi 2015). With Einaudi, she has also published the novels Lo spazio bianco (2008), which Francesca Comencini transposed into a film of the same title, Lettera di dimissioni (2011) and Tempo di imparare (2014). She has written the plays Il verdetto (Bompiani 2007), Tre terzi (Einaudi 2009, together with Diego De Silva and Antonio Pascale), Ciao maschio (Bompiani 2009), Antigone (Einaudi 2012) and Euridice e Orfeo (Bompiani 2015). For years she has written the book column in Grazia
and collaborates with la Repubblica.