I was an ugly ducking myself and I had the fantasy that one day I would turn into a movie star.  I had no intention of becoming a swan.  Furthermore, in the exquisite illustrations of the book my friends looked totally different from the way I had imagined them.  The Little Mermaid did not have green hair. She was blonde!

 I liked the book and soon I learned all the stories by heart, but I no longer wanted to be any of the characters in it. I wanted to control the plots, I wanted to be the narrator, to be Hans Christian Andersen. Maybe that was a turning point in my life.  My mother says that as soon as I began to read I started making up stories. I was always tormenting my poor brothers with morbid tales that filled their days with terror and their dreams with nightmares.  Later my children and my grandchildren had to go through the same ordeal. In my adult life, however, stories have helped me to gain the hearts of a few men.  There is nothing quite as aphrodisiac as a story told with passion between two clean, ironed sheets…  In my childhood I was often punished for telling lies. Now that I make a living with these lies, I am respected as a “narrator”.

 I imagine that Hans Christian Andersen endured the same fate.  At the beginning people must have thought that he was mentally disturbed. Why was he not working as a shoemaker, like his father?  That was a perfectly decent job, while telling stories was not considered a reasonable occupation, but a character flaw. And yet stories have always been essential, they are to humankind what dreams are to individuals.  As individuals we need to dream, if we are not allowed to dream we perish, suffocated by pervasive demons. And without stories civilization would perish, there would be no collective memory, no understanding of events, no spiritual legacy.  Storytelling has contributed to shape the human mind since the beginning of time.  Some tales, repeated over and over, describe our journey through life and death. We find them in immortal myths reiterated everywhere, the lost paradise, the hero in search of justice, the struggle between good and evil, the battles against the dragons in our own souls. All the great plots have already been told.  We can only create new versions of the same ones, but every time a good story is told it comes again to life with the same charm of the first tale.  And that is exactly what Andersen’s stories do to us.  They charm us every single time!