In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing

by Elena Ferrante

Literary genres are safe areas, solid platforms. There I can place a pale sketch of a story and practice with calm, wary pleasure. 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.

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

“That’s not easy. Hasn’t a man his own character, his own interests, his own tastes and passions according to which he either exaggerates or understates? Tell the thing as it is, you say! . . . That might not even happen twice in one day in a whole city.