Elena Ferrante: ‘I used to devour news. Now, the uninterrupted rain of it feels like chaos’

It seems to me more difficult today than in the past to try to understand how the world is going

I don’t feel desperate to be informed about everything that happens in the world. As a girl, I merely glanced at the newspaper headlines and occasionally watched the TV news.

But a growing interest in politics, which erupted when I was around 20, inspired me to amass information. It seemed to me that until then I’d lived in a state of distraction, and I was afraid I’d go through life without even being aware of the disasters, the horrors around me. I feared I would become a superficial person, unconsciously complicit. So I forced myself to read the newspapers, and then since that didn’t seem sufficient, moved on to books of contemporary history, sociology, philosophy. There was a period when, against my nature, I even stopped reading novels: it seemed like time stolen from the need to live in my own era with eyes wide open.

Related: Elena Ferrante: ‘I insist on writing things I think I would never put in writing’

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