In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing

by Elena Ferrante

More generally, I believe that the sense I have of writing—and all the struggles it involves—has to do with the satisfaction of staying beautifully within the margins and, at the same time, with the impression of loss, of waste, because of that success.

The way we see ourselves dragging outside, by means of the written word, an imaginary “inside,” which is by its nature fleeting,

And I imagined that I was in a race against time, a race in which the writer always lagged behind. While, in fact, the letters were rapidly lining up next to one another, asserting themselves, the vision fled, and writing was destined to a frustrating approximation. It was too slow to capture the brain wave. The “so many letters” were slow, they strove to capture the past while they themselves became the past, and much was lost.

When I reread myself, I had the impression that a voice flitting around my head was carrying more than what had actually become letters.

For a woman who has something to say, does it really take a miracle—I said to myself—to dissolve the margins within which nature has enclosed her and show herself in her own words to the world?

Woolf’s idea seems clear: writing is camping out in her own brain, without getting lost in the very numerous, varied, inferior modalities with which every day, as Virginia, she lives a raw life.

Our impression is that writers talk about writing too often in an unsatisfying way. Think of when we say: the story tells itself, the character constructs him or her self, the language speaks to us, as if it were not us writing but someone else, who lives in us, tracing a course from the ancient world to our times: the god who dictates; the descent of the Holy Spirit; ecstasy; the encoded word in the unconscious; the network of relationships that we get caught in and each time modifies us, and so on.

And characters? I feel they are false when they exhibit clear coherence and I become passionate about them when they say one thing and do the opposite.

Just tell the thing as you will, I will listen as I can and believe as I am able.”

Telling the real, Jacques emphasized, is constitutionally difficult; you have to deal with the fact that the teller is always a distorting mirror.

I noticed that in literary work reality tended inevitably to be reduced to a rich repertory of tricks that, if skillfully used, gave the impression that the facts had arrived on the page just as they had happened, with all their sociological, political, psychological, ethical, etc., connotations.

Anyone who has literary ambitions knows that the motivations, both great and small, that impel the hand to write come from “real life”: the yearning to describe the pain of love, the pain of living, the anguish of death; the need to straighten the world that is all crooked; the search for a new morality that will reshape us; the urgency to give voice to the humble, to strip away power and its atrocities; the need to prophesy disasters but also to design happy worlds to come from there.