Laura Torrisi: “When I realized I was my own worst enemy”

The request to write a book, yet another, came like a bolt from the blue, but it was not formulated by a publishing house. «Sara Gazzini, my story friend, my friend asked to do it. In the pandemic, with the impossibility of seeing each other in person, she found herself re-reading old Whatsapp conversations, and there, among the digital words, she discovered a depth that she asked me to share “, she says. Laura Torrisi, now in the bookstore with PS Always write to me (Mondadori 2021, pp. 180, € 17.10), an absolutely autobiographical story of an exchange that has become universal. The book, which the actress agreed to write not without reservations, traces in a letter form the exchange, “real and spontaneous”, that Torrisi and Sara Gazzini had in the days of lockdown, “when the pandemic, forcing us into the house, forced all of us to look into the abyss ».

Why did you agree to go public with what should have been private conversations?
«I admit that I had some doubts when Sara, already author of three books, asked me to write this first one together. Several times over the years I have been offered to put my life on paper, but I have always refused. Why on earth, I wondered, would anyone be intrigued by what happens to me? And why write an autobiography now? I always thought it was something proper to the last phase of existence ».

So what made you change your mind?
«The awareness that, by writing it, I would have had the opportunity to share experiences in which other people could have found themselves. This is something that I started doing on social networks, where I alternate moments of reflection with the publication of ordinary contents. I find the epistolary form very beautiful. It is undoubtedly ancient, but it becomes innovative if contextualized in a modern context ».

In fact, they are not your letters, but emails.
“And every now and then they have brought difficult phases with them. I have always had many diaries, but in writing this book I experienced the proverbial writer’s block. Moments of stasis, alternating with moments of fullness, in which the words flowed by themselves ».

In the very first pages, everything is already there: his daughter, Sicily, endometriosis. Is there anything she has failed to deal with?
“In a very genuine way, I think I have talked about everything that is close to my heart. We always think that behind a character there is a bright world, full of light, and we end up losing sight of reality. Behind a character there is a person. We are not immune to the bad things in life, including disease. This I wanted to say ».

Endometriosis, then, he had already told via social.
“Actually, I tried to tell it even ten years ago. at the time, however, the story had been exploited by the media, which had made an improper use of it. Talking about depression and people who can’t have children, on the other hand, takes tact. I was able to do it when, online, I got the warmth of people who could understand, feel what I was, what I am and what I have lived ».

Don’t you find that on social media today it is easier to talk about certain topics, that there is more honesty than in the past?
“Endometriosis is always a disease that is talked about too little, but I believe that today, online, there is much more honesty. I can’t say where it came from, but the pandemic has played a key role in encouraging it. It is as if people had understood only through isolation that they could open up, as if they had rediscovered the power of sharing and the desire to help each other, muffling their sense of loneliness through a common experience. I really like all this, and not only in relation to the disease ».

Social media, however, seem unable to get rid of a certain toxic component. How does it relate to “judges”, haters, all-rounders and various?
«With indifference. I learned not to give weight to certain comments, above all because I believe that what you write reveals more about the author than about the recipient of the post ».

In PS Always write to me, speaks of self-esteem, falls and failures. How did this awareness come to mature?
“Partly, right through my falls. I owe them a lot: they showed me sides of me, imperfections, which over time I learned to love. The scars mark, but they teach and not focusing only on pain, trying instead to educate the eye so that it learns to grasp the hidden meaning of what happens to us was fundamental. Difficult, because as a woman raised in a Sicilian family I have the drama inside, but fundamental ».