Discovering ante litteram models of writing that heals and saves. After Giuseppe Berto, Marianna Procopio

If the theories that came from America could have had no influence on Berto’s Il male oscuro, an established and successful author in whom I accidentally discovered for the first time an ante litteram model of narrative medicine, much less could they have had on the writing of a rather singular book, published in Padua 1962, with the title Diario e altri testi. The book consists of four parts. The text that interests us is contained in the first of them, subtitled Malattia e morte della madre, and divided into several unnumbered chapters. The author is Marianna Procopio. An atypical case from a literary point of view, Marianna was a housewife born at the end of the nineteenth century in Calabria, with an education that stopped at the third grade, and she wrote for the first time in her life at the age of fifty, after a trauma caused by the death of her mother. This event broke Marianna’s life into two parts that would never be reunited again and rises in her mind to the disturbing grandeur of an epochal era, placing all the rest of the events in a ‘relative’ time that was either before or after it. Wandering around the rooms of the house in vain search for a presence that is such only in her imagination and dreams, Marianna finds in fixing memories on paper, in reviewing the moments that slowly led her mother to death, in continuously updating the calendar of the anniversary, a catharsis from the suffering that is offered by the liberating function of writing. Marianna Procopio’s Diary is therefore the second ante litteram narrative medicine model I discovered.