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Ferrante: Bovary and Karenina are, in some way, descendants of Dido and Medea, but they have lost the obscure force that pushed those heroines of the ancient world to use infanticide or suicide as rebellion or revenge or curse. Rather, they experience the time of abandonment as a punishment for the…

But how did I want to be? When I thought of her, once I was an adult, once I was far away, I sought a means of understanding what type of woman I could become. I wanted to be beautiful, but how? Was it possible that you necessarily had to choose between dullness and ostentation? Don’t both paths le…

She copied them from dresses worn by movie stars, princesses, from the models of fashion designers. But she had the gift of remaking them so that on her they seemed more charged with energy. My mother never sewed a dress for herself that didn’t make her appear an extraordinary woman. Whereas at hom…

In bed now, in the vast marriage bed, I said to myself that if I wanted to understand why Mario had left me I should think back to the pleasure of slight flirtations like that, with no consequences, a harmless, frivolous pleasure that lightened the days. Maybe for him, too, it had begun like that, …

Is it therapy, is it thaumaturgy?