The icing on the cake – Domenico Starnone

◆ Today the title of writer is highly coveted. The word is now a destination for anyone who puts into volume some of his experiences, possibly with a narrative trend. You can write in newspapers for years, you can produce essays of excellent scientific quality, but it takes that type of book to earn the television caption: “journalist and writer”, “neuroscientist and writer”, “jurist and writer” and so on. This was not the case once. If one was a mathematician, he was a mathematician, and if he wrote science fiction as a hobby, he was a little ashamed. As for the rare famous writers, they held onto their title. They aimed, of course, at the status of well-paid journalists, but they just called themselves writers. The new world has changed the cards on the table. Writing with literary ambitions is today the icing on the cake of prestigious careers in the most varied sectors. And even just graduating a storyteller, retiring to write, finding a moment in the crowd of daily grind to jot down a few lines, is ideally more satisfying than a medical degree, a nice liquidation, a walk. How did it happen? Looking for reasons is long and complicated. Let’s just say it is a good thing: it means that, against all catastrophic predictions, the aura of writing has resisted and making literature has become a mass aspiration.