In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing

by Elena Ferrante

I was punished so often that the sense of the boundary became part of me, and when I write by hand I feel the threat of the vertical red line even though I haven’t used paper like that for years.

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.

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?

the “I” who writes seriously is twenty people, a hypersensitive plurality all concentrated in the hand provided with the pen.

For me true writing is that: not an elegant, studied gesture but a convulsive act.

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, disarrange, delude, mistake, fail, soil.

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

What we call “inner life” is a permanent flashing in the brain that wants to take shape as voice, as writing.

But I had already lost faith: the now true ring, which as a true object of my true experience should have given truth to the writing, seemed inevitably false.

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

how I, the author—a fiction forever incomplete, molded by years and years of reading and the desire to write—invent and disrupt the writing that has recorded them.

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.

into the fiction of an easily manageable literary form, and therefore a form that, precisely because it’s false, can and must be deformed.

Gertrude’s virtue is to succeed by sticking to the old, well-known game but in order to disrupt it and bend it to her purposes.

writing about our own joys and wounds and sense of the world means writing in every way, always, knowing that we are the product, good or bad, of encounters and clashes, sought out and accidental, with the stuff of others.

inhabit the forms and then deform everything that doesn’t contain us entirely, that can’t in any way contain us.

the yearning to untie yourself from yourself; the dream of becoming the other without impediment; being yourself while you are me; a flow of language and writing without feeling otherness as a barrier.