Italian writer Oriana Fallaci dies

'Tigress of the typewriter'
The woman dubbed “the tigress of the typewriter” began interviewing Hollywood celebrities, but soon narrowed her subjects to those with the power to shape the world.

The New Yorker wrote in a recent profile that Fallaci disarmed her subjects with “bald questions about death, God and pity” and “displayed a sinuous, crafty intelligence.”

Among those who submitted to her grilling was Khomeini. “That’s enough. I’m tired. That’s enough,” the Iranian leader said at the end of the session. Fallaci’s interview with Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi in a tent in the desert lasted five days.

Kissinger said of his interview with Fallaci: “Why I agreed to it, I’ll never know.”

Lech Walesa, who won the Nobel Peace prize for his work with the Polish Solidarity labor movement, recalled cutting short her interview in the early 1980s. “She was a great writer, a great journalist, but she used some sort of shortcuts in thinking,” Walesa said.

Fallaci once described journalism as “a moral commitment. It’s courage, it’s culture.”

She also wrestled with existential questions like why women decide to have children and turned her musings into best sellers, including the 1975 “Letter to a Child Never Born.”

Opinionated on America
She expressed frustration about what she called Americans’ lack of knowledge about life outside their borders, but still professed preferring life in America to that in Italy. She divided her time between Tuscany and a book-filled apartment in Manhattan.

While many in Europe were questioning U.S. policy after the Sept. 11 attacks, Fallaci made a stinging indictment of Muslim immigrants and Italian ambivalence toward America.

In a front-page essay in Corriere della Sera, Fallaci wrote: “I don’t go around singing ‘Our Father’ and ‘Hail Mary’ in front of Muhammad’s tomb.”

“She interpreted the discomfort of Western modernity, perhaps at times with tones you couldn’t share, but certainly she interpreted it, and luckily there was someone to interpret it,” said Ferruccio De Bortoli, Corriere’s editor at the time.

Fallaci took the Catholic Church to task for being what she considered too weak before the Muslim world. But she praised Pope Benedict XVI for urging Europeans to value their Christian roots and had a private audience with him at the papal summer residence in Castel Gandolfo.

“I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true,” Fallaci told The Wall Street Journal in a recent interview.

Fallaci never married and had no children. A nephew, Edoardo, told reporters in Florence that no wake or funeral service was planned.

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