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 struggle is due to the fact that the present—the entire present, even that of the “I” who writes, letter by letter—can’t maintain with clarity the thought-vision, which always comes before, is always the past, and therefore tends to be blotted out.

the insufficiency of language in the face of love, whether love of another human being or love of God.

If Love, lighting a new, unheard-of spark, has raised me up high, to a place that had been inaccessible to me, why can’t it violate the usual rules of the game, and allow my pen to find words that will reproduce, as truly as possible, the pain of my love?

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?

But really I am waiting for my brain to get distracted, to slip up, for other I’s—many—outside the margins to join together, take my hand, begin to pull me with the writing where I’m afraid to go, where it hurts me to go, where, if I go too far, I won’t necessarily know how to get back.

I’m something quite different, a quite different thing, a wordless thing in an empty place, a hard shut dry cold black place, where nothing stirs, nothing speaks, and that I listen, and that I seek, like a caged beast born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born in a cage and dead in a cage, born and then dead, born in a cage and then dead in a cage, in a word like a beast, in one of their words, like such a beast,

Beautiful writing becomes beautiful when it loses its harmony and has the desperate power of the ugly.

I couldn’t contain myself, I was going to spill out into the world, into the other, into others, and write about them.

Reality was a game of illusion that to succeed had to pretend that no one had told it, no one had written it, and the real was there, reproduced so well that it made you forget even the marks of the alphabet.

With greater or less ability we fabricate fictions not so that the false will seem true but to tell the most unspeakable truth with absolute faithfulness through the fiction.

You hear? My, my, my. How often we repeat that possessive adjective. In fact, a first big step forward, in the matter of writing, is to discover exactly the opposite: that what we triumphantly consider ours belongs to others.

Writing is, rather, entering an immense cemetery where every tomb is waiting to be profaned.

As soon as we try to write something, one more problem regarding the inadequacy of the writing is added to those I’ve tried to list: that not a single page, whether polished or rough, speaks our truth as women completely, in fact often doesn’t speak it at all.