Elena Ferrante's Blog

Elena Ferrante: this is my last column, after a year that has scared and inspired me

Writing every Saturday has meant the permanent exposure of fragments of myself. But I am indebted to you, my readers

This exercise ends here: I gave myself a year, and the year is up. I had never done work like this, and I hesitated a good deal before trying it. I was afraid of the weekly deadline; I was afraid of having to write even if I didn’t feel like it; I was afraid of the need to publish without having scrupulously considered every word. In the end, curiosity won out.

I tried to meet the challenge by imagining that I had 52 questions to answer in writing, one a week. I thought that was something I knew how to do by now: for years, I’d been answering journalists’ questions. So that’s how I proceeded, diligently. But I have to admit that, despite the extreme courtesy of my editors, I was constantly afraid of not succeeding in the task I’d undertaken, of somehow rashly being insulting to readers, of losing faith in myself and having to give up. Fortunately, the anxiety of publication was amply counterbalanced by the pleasure of writing. Today I can say with assurance that, even if I never have this experience again, it was very useful to me, and I’m grateful to this newspaper for giving me the opportunity.

Related: Elena Ferrante: A writer’s talent is like a fishing net, catching daily experiences that can educate

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Elena Ferrante: A writer’s talent is like a fishing net, catching daily experiences that can educate

We fall in love with a text partly for the way it unwittingly informs us

There’s a very old function of literature that over time has lost currency, probably because of its dangerous proximity to the political and ethical spheres. I mean the idea that one of the purposes of a text is to instruct. Over the past 50 years, we have wisely convinced ourselves that the pleasure and enjoyment of a text are at one with its style. Very true: a text is made up of words, and the more beautifully chosen and put together the words are, the more seductive the text, and the more disruptive to the body of the reader. But the words, delighting us, shape our visions of the world; they penetrate our bodies, flow in and alter it, educating our gaze, feelings, even our position on different issues. Besides giving pleasure, style, in accordance with a long tradition, moves and teaches us.

We fall in love with a text partly for the way it unwittingly informs us; that is, for the wealth of vivid, true experiences that pass from the writer directly into the life of the reader. It’s not just the meticulous choice of vocabulary, the metaphors, the memorable similes. What counts is how the writer inserts herself into the literary tradition – not only with her ability to orchestrate words, but with her ideas and the very personal store of urgent things she has to tell. An individual talent acts like a fishing net that captures daily experiences, holds them together imaginatively, and connects them to fundamental questions about the human condition.

Related: Elena Ferrante: ‘If people still told their stories in verse, I would be too embarrassed to write’

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Elena Ferrante: A writer’s talent is like a fishing net, catching daily experiences that can educate

We fall in love with a text partly for the way it unwittingly informs us

There’s a very old function of literature that over time has lost currency, probably because of its dangerous proximity to the political and ethical spheres. I mean the idea that one of the purposes of a text is to instruct. Over the past 50 years, we have wisely convinced ourselves that the pleasure and enjoyment of a text are at one with its style. Very true: a text is made up of words, and the more beautifully chosen and put together the words are, the more seductive the text, and the more disruptive to the body of the reader. But the words, delighting us, shape our visions of the world; they penetrate our bodies, flow in and alter it, educating our gaze, feelings, even our position on different issues. Besides giving pleasure, style, in accordance with a long tradition, moves and teaches us.

We fall in love with a text partly for the way it unwittingly informs us; that is, for the wealth of vivid, true experiences that pass from the writer directly into the life of the reader. It’s not just the meticulous choice of vocabulary, the metaphors, the memorable similes. What counts is how the writer inserts herself into the literary tradition – not only with her ability to orchestrate words, but with her ideas and the very personal store of urgent things she has to tell. An individual talent acts like a fishing net that captures daily experiences, holds them together imaginatively, and connects them to fundamental questions about the human condition.

Related: Elena Ferrante: ‘If people still told their stories in verse, I would be too embarrassed to write’

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Elena Ferrante on climate change: ‘I've become obsessive. Black skies terrify me'

I never worried about the weather – until now

As a child I loved storms, and as an adult, too, I’ve felt an excitement in the presence of dark skies, lightning, thunder, the rushing sound of water, puddles, the smell of wet clothes. I also like fine weather, but for me the smell of the air before the rain has something more.

Whenever it rained, my mother had endless warnings. She was afraid I’d catch a cold, she bundled me up till I was almost suffocating, she worried about wet feet. But I dreamed of splashing with my feet in the rain water; I wanted to feel my hair pasted to my head, the drops sliding into my eyes. As a child and adolescent, I experienced rain as a promise of adventure – the exposure of the body to the wild, a challenge to the swelling, threatening sky. And as a woman I loved spring; I’d happily lie in the sun, but I adored autumn, too, even the arrival of the cold. I never worried about weather: heat, humidity, wind, rain, snow, cold – the more I was outside, the better. The seasons were time running pleasantly in a circle, like a happy dog chasing its tail.

Related: Elena Ferrante on the screen adaptation of her book: 'I want to say, let's give it up'

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Elena Ferrante: ‘Recently I found a photograph of myself that I liked’

The woman in the frame doesn’t match the one in my mind

I am one of those people who never like the way they look in photographs or videos. As soon as I realise that a friend or relative is pointing a phone at me, I turn my back, cover my face with my hands, and say, “No, I’ll look bad, stop it, I’m not photogenic.” But some time ago I happened to find a photo of myself at 17, and I liked it so much that – extraordinarily – I had it framed and put it on display on a bookshelf. Everyone – friends, relatives – who saw it was puzzled: how pretty you look, is that really you? Even a person who’s known me for decades and is very fond of me said, after praising the image, “But to tell you the truth, I don’t think you really looked like that.”

Eventually, I, too, had to admit that I liked this picture precisely because I didn’t at all resemble the image I usually had of myself. Was it possible that I had had those features only at 17, at the end of a painful adolescence (like almost every adolescence)? Hard to say. When I think about that year, it doesn’t seem to me that I was especially satisfied with myself, or with my appearance, something that the photo would have justified. Rather, I had to admit that at the time the image hadn’t particularly struck me – maybe I considered it just one of the many I would happily have torn up. Or probably I hadn’t disliked the photo, but, because I didn’t have a high opinion of myself, I hadn’t recognised myself and had immediately forgotten it.

Related: Elena Ferrante: ‘I don’t believe people who swear they’re not the jealous type’

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Elena Ferrante: ‘If people still told their stories in verse, I would be too embarrassed to write’

Writing prose with the rhythm, the harmony, the images that characterise a poem is a death trap

I grew up with the idea that being a poet is for truly exceptional people, while anyone can have a go at prose. Maybe it was the fault of my school, which instilled a sort of awe for anyone who writes poetry. Schoolbooks and teachers portrayed poets as superior beings, with great virtues and sometimes fascinating vices; they were in permanent dialogue with the gods, thanks to the Muses – able to look at past and future as no one else did, and naturally they had an exceptional talent for language. I found this paralysing, and so at a certain point I reduced their status in my mind. But I became an assiduous reader of poetry.

I love the connections poetry makes, so unexpected and bold that they become indecipherable. I’m sure that writing mediocre poems is a mortal sin; if people still mainly told their stories in verse, as they did for many centuries, I would be too embarrassed to write. But even if, after a long battle, prose now occupies almost all the narrative space, deep inside I feel that it’s a constitutionally inferior form of writing. This is probably what has driven me since I was a girl to exaggerate with language; part of me aspires to the poetic and hates the prosaic – I want to prove that I’m not inferior.

Related: Elena Ferrante: ‘I don’t believe people who swear they’re not the jealous type’

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Elena Ferrante: I like to rewrite stories – swapping men for women. It doesn’t always work

A woman who decides to give it all up rarely turns back, while men generally, at a certain point, need their Ithaca

Sometimes I play a game with myself in which I take stories with male protagonists – famous stories that I like a lot – and ask myself: if the protagonist were a woman, would it work just as well? Could Melville’s Bartleby, for example, be female? Or Stevenson’s Jekyll? Italo Svevo’s Zeno? Calvino’s Baron In The Trees?

For many years, the game has revolved mainly around Wakefield, a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Wakefield is a man who lives in crowded 19th-century London. One morning, he says goodbye to his wife and goes out. He’s supposed to be away for a few days; he doesn’t leave the city, but instead, for no reason, with no plan, he goes to live near his own house, and for 20 years – until, in the same impulsive way, he returns to his wife – confines himself to observing his own absence. The story is well known and much studied.

Related: This is a great time for writing by women – so why are we still considered second-rate?

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Elena Ferrante: ‘I don’t believe people who swear they’re not the jealous type’

We’ve all experienced it – not necessarily in love, but in every kind of relationship

To my regret, I frequently come across jealous people. In my fiction, I’ve written often about this repugnant feeling but, in general, unhappily. The result is always disappointing: from Shakespeare to Proust, everything that could be said has been said, beautifully, and it seems a wasted effort. Besides, I feel some reluctance to dig into myself and what I know about the many jealous people I’ve loved and love. Not to mention that I often run into people who say, in anguished tones, “Forget it, you don’t know enough about jealousy. I do, I know all the torments.” Jealousy is a yellowish muck that we stick our hands into without even the satisfaction of extracting some truth of our own.

And yet it’s hard to ignore the feeling: like it or not, in trivial or extreme form, we’ve all experienced it – not necessarily in love, but in every kind of relationship. Of course I’ve met many people who swear they are not the jealous type. But I’ve pretty quickly had to put them into the category of perjurers: jealousy suddenly appeared in their eyes, though they hurried to retract it – embarrassed, hoping I hadn’t noticed.

Related: Elena Ferrante: ‘Maggie Gyllenhaal is filming one of my books. It’s her story to tell now'

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Elena Ferrante: when a friend died at 38, I thought that would be my allotted time, too

When I got to 38, things changed. I was pleased I had made it, and thought, ‘Everything after this is a bonus’

A woman I was very attached to died young, at 38. She had been married to a man she loved, had three small children and many talents that were beginning to bear fruit. I was younger than she was when she died; now, I’m much older. For a long time I considered her 38 years a sort of goal. If that had been her allotted span, surely that limit could also be mine. So I thought of my life as if it would not last longer than 38 years.

I know that may seem ridiculous but, in some corner of myself, it really was like that. And, all in all, I’m glad: in many ways I had a different sense of time from my contemporaries. I ran; they lingered. I felt old and burdened by responsibilities; they seemed young and irresponsible.

Related: Elena Ferrante: ‘I devote myself to plants. Is it because I am afraid of them?’

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Elena Ferrante on the screen adaptation of her book: 'I want to say, let's give it up'

Stripped down, the novel suddenly appears to the writer a trick of literary words, a fraud

I speak as an inexperienced screenwriter. When I write a book, and someone decides to make it into a movie, I’m glad.

Then? Then the work begins. My first impression is traumatic, as the literary cover is torn off my novel by the screenwriters. It’s a terrible moment: I worked on that text for years, and now everything seems to become impoverished: places, events, characters. A city square minutely described is reduced in the screenplay to the simple common noun: square. An event to which I devoted many pages shrinks, becomes a stage direction. Characters become names, actions are abridged, as are lines of dialogue. Stripped down, the novel suddenly appears to the writer to be a trick of literary words, a fraud, and she is slightly ashamed. The story, in this summary form, is banal. The density I thought I had achieved has vanished. I have to acknowledge that I failed to include things that now seem essential and gave too much space to what now seems superfluous. I want to say, “Let’s give it up – my novel doesn’t seem suitable.”

Related: Elena Ferrante: ‘People who are enemies for no reason fascinate me'

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