‘I love children who lie for no reason. After all, I used to be one’

Sometimes, someone would say: it’s too good, it can’t really have happened. And then I was ashamed…

As a child, I was a big liar; I told all kinds of lies. I lied in order to seem better than I was. I lied to boast about things I would like to have done, but hadn’t. I often got into real trouble, because I was consistent with my lies, confessing sins that I had committed only in a lie. I told anguished lies – painful to remember – improvised in a hurry to avoid some act of violence, usually on the part of boys.

But the lies that I liked best – and I told quite a number of them – served absolutely no purpose. I put a lot into them and did all I could to make them seem like things that had really happened. They seemed so true that even I, as I was speaking, had the impression they weren’t lies. Or maybe it’s the opposite: I would tell lies without considering them lies, so they gave a stronger appearance of truth.

Related: Elena Ferrante: ‘Even when dialogue imposes an ellipsis, I avoid it’

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