Reading emotions. Marie-AudeMurail’s stories as salvific narration

Abstract

Marie-Aude Murail, a famous and award-winning storyteller, has been meeting her readers for almost forty years, experiencing in the field that children’s and young people’s literature is a privileged access to the emotions and possible conflicts present in today’s European culture, as well as to relevant issues of our contemporaneity. Murail writes and publishes novels for girls and boys (Gramantieri, 2016; Chérer, 2011; Filograsso, 2015; Trisciuzzi, 2016, Trisciuzzi 2018), coming of age stories – Bildungsroman (Moretti, 1986; Lopez, 2011; Bernardi, 2011; Trisciuzzi, 2014) narrating, with irony and authenticity, familyties, adoption, sexuality, violence against women, abortion, illness, death, because, as she says, “young readers do not want to be protected, they need the honesty not to hide things and the will to leave a little hope” (Murail, 2016). By telling stories of children and young adults who find the courage to follow their dreams and ambitions, their feelings and desires, to open up and listen to their emotions, without surrendering to standardised solutions, refusing to conform even by going against family and social expectations, the writer allows her novels, now considered crossover and therefore for all ages, a “medical narrative”, a salvific narrative solution to the wounds of life.