Marina Morgatta Savarese, "La bruttina che conquista"

I pick up these two thin, pink booklets, “The Ugly one who Conquer” and “How to keep a man”, with inviting designs on the cover and, let’s face it, maybe after the critical tome on Proust or Hesse they attract me a lot for the appetizing and fluffy chick lit aspect, even if we are not dealing with novels here. The expectationsthey create are two and they are both disappointed: that the little books in question are badly written, and they are not, and that they say something new by solving my problems, and they don’t even do that.

If we are ugly (in this specific case I am), we certainly cultivate the secret and imperishable hope of stumbling upon the magic recipe book that will transform us, or into the free and miraculous beauty advice. Pious illusion.

“The Ugly one buried her self esteem in the drawer of memories (and threw away the key.) Perhaps the last compliment she received was on her first birthday, when, still unconscious, she did not understand the irony of the phrase” how cute this little girl ”, a classic recognition of the circumstance where it is not allowed to tell the mother that her baby is a monster. Then she understood what the ugly woman realizes even by herself: that she is really ugly. And life always backs up these convictions, continuing to rage with jabs and small stabs at every opportunity, crumbling every brick of trust and every little conquest. And so the ugly girl adapts, lets herself be hit, cancels herself, eliminates feelings and all kinds of expectations. “

Savarese declares herself Ugly, she tells us that she has become cool by showing off style, the right wardrobe and enhancing her skills of sympathy and communicativeness, but she does not tell us what we must actually do, what we must choose in our depressing sessions in front of the ‘closet, to transform us from ugly ducklings into superb sailing swans. She offers us no prodigious remedy, no supernatural, arcane advice, only the usual palliatives, heard over and over again, about not neglecting oneself, about showing oneself at best, about being independent, self-confident and, of course, whores to the right point and in the good sense of the word.

And — I am horrified, me priestesses of cosmic pessimism — to be offered the usual theory of “be positive, be happy”, of the show of enthusiasm that conquers the male on duty. I doubt that she is really talking about how to turn ugly into beautiful (if that were the case, the book would make the author a billionaire) but she is rather proposing the equation ugly equals ordinary woman. In short, it relies on the metamorphosis of the ugly into the comely but in reality she is discussing in general, showing each woman the way to independence, security, autonomy, style, elegance, emancipation.

In the second text there is an evolution, both from a linguistic and content point of view. The style becomes more incisive, ironic, cutting edge, the author demonstrates that she has a brain and culture and that the sharp erotic claws are only an aspect of her personality and not an obsession. And if, even in this case, the advice for keeping the male specimen, the previously conquered lover, appears obvious, the careful social analysis of the variegated (and somewhat sad) undergrowth of thirty / forty-year-olds looking for mating catches the eye. The fauna that populates it is devoted to disengagement, emotional instability, peterpanism, immaturity. We see crowds of hardened singles, trombamis allergic to marriage and bewildered, figures whose right to dignity is claimed but who, for those who belong to generations still imbued with romanticism, are dripping with squalor and inadequacy.

Some descriptions are really hilarious, especially those in which it is easy to track down some male we know, such as the mystical man, who, to understand, is all chakra, energy, incense and vegan restaurants.

“If you are not deeply spiritual too, all this asceticism in the long run will make you lose patience, making you dream of closing all his chakras once and for all.”

Savarese, currently residing in Florence but living for many years in Livorno, has absorbed from the Labronica city the witty, sharp, irreverent and somewhat foul-mouthed spirit that always makes one call a spade a spade. She is passionate about fashion, design, dance, burlesque, pop culture, full of interests and informed, she seems to know the subject from direct experience, an experience always filtered by irony (and by a healthy self-irony). She has questioned many friends, both male and female, drawing up rankings and statistics of the most common attitudes. All with a light hand, acumen, sympathy, spirit, fun. Above all with that decisive air, able to transform any ugly girl into a daring woman, a woman who knows how to conquer — planting with confidence her feet on the ground and not stamping capriciously — her place in this world which is not always welcoming.