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.

I was afraid, as I said, that it was precisely my female nature that kept me from bringing the pen as close as possible to the pain I wanted to express.

Maybe what saves me—though it doesn’t take much for salvation to be revealed as perdition—is that beneath the need for order is an enduring energy that will stumble,