Oriana Fallaci, the internationally famous Italian journalist and interviewer of the high, mighty, and unbelievably important, has written and had published a novel, and to publicize it she asked eighteen people, some of whom she didn’t know at all personally but all of whom she knew worked for newspapers or magazines or television, to lunch at “21.” Oriana Fallaci’s novel, titled A Man, is about a hero of the Greek resistance who uncovers evidence of great corruption and all-around wrongdoing in powerful circles in Greek politics but is killed before he can expose the wicked people. In real life, Oriana Fallaci said to her guests, she was in love with a hero of the Greek resistance who uncovered evidence of great corruption and all-around wrongdoing in powerful circles in Greek politics but was killed before he could expose the wicked people.
At the lunch, Oriana Fallaci, who is petite and pretty, sat with all her guests at an oblong dining table. A few times, she
said “you Americans” in a way that many Western Europeans like to say “you Americans”—a way that many Americans find annoying. She also said, “What is fiction?” and “People ask me if this or that incident in the book was true, and I say, ‘It’s all true,’ though, of course, the truth is always longer.” She said, “I love politics. There are some people who don’t resist alcohol, some people who don’t resist drugs. I don’t resist politics,” and “My father laughed a lot. Once, I said to him, ‘Father, how come you always laugh and never cry?’ and he said, ‘It’s the same thing,’” and “You don’t steel yourself against life as I did for three years to write a book; you write it and face the task of writing it,” and “Alekos said to me, ‘I will die and you will love me forever and you’ll write a book about me,’” and “Anything can be said about me but not that I don’t write good Italian. I am Florentine, God damn it.”
A guest said to her, “Oriana, journalism is something you are in temporary retreat from.”
Another guest said, “You must find Ronald Reagan interesting.”
—December 8, 1980