Activity

Ferrante: I don’t know. I’ve always had a tendency to separate everyday life from writing. To tolerate existence, we lie, and we lie above all to ourselves. Sometimes we tell ourselves lovely tales, sometimes petty lies. Falsehoods protect us, mitigate suffering, allow us to avoid the terrifying mo…

I think of writing now as a long, tiring, pleasant seduction. The stories that you tell, the words that you use and refine, the characters you try to give life to are merely tools with which you circle around the elusive, unnamed, shapeless thing that belongs to you alone, and which nevertheless is…

I wrote this story because it has to do with me. I was inside it for a long time. I kept shortening the distance between the protagonist and me, I occupied all her cavities, and there is nothing about her, today, that I wouldn’t do. So I’m exhausted, and now that the story is finished I have to cat…

Besides, I confess that I don’t like a narrative that tells me programmatically what Naples is like today, what its young people are like today, what the women have become, how the family is in crisis, what ills Italy suffers from. I have the impression that such works are almost always the staging…