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 of media clichés, the poeticizing of a magazine article, of a television segment, of sociological research, of a party position. What I expect, instead, from a good story is that it will tell me about today what I can’t know from any other source but that story, from its unique way of putting something into words, from the feeling that it implies.

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 catch my breath. How? I don’t know, maybe by starting to write another book. Or reading as many as possible on the subject of this story, and so remaining nearby, on the sidelines, and testing it the way you test a cake to see if it’s baked, poking it with a toothpick, pricking the text to see if it’s done.

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 a sort of key to all the doors, the real reason that you spend so much of your life sitting at a table tapping away, filling pages. The question in every story is the same: is this the right story to seize what lies silent in my depths, that living thing which, if captured, spreads through all the pages and gives them life? The answer is uncertain, even when you get to the end. What happened in the lines, between the lines? Often, after struggles and joys, on the pages there is nothing—events, dialogues, dramatic turns, only that—and you’re frightened by your very desperation.

To me it happens like this: I always struggle at first, it’s hard to get started, no opening seems really convincing; then the story gets going, the bits already written gain power and suddenly find a way of fitting together; then writing becomes a pleasure, the hours are a time of intense enjoyment, the characters never leave you, they have a space-time of their own in which they are alive and increasingly vivid, they are inside and outside you, they exist solidly in the streets, in the houses, in the places where the story must unfold; the endless possibilities of the plot select themselves and the choices seem inevitable, definitive. You begin every day by rereading to get energized, and rereading is pleasant, it means perfecting, enhancing, touching up the past to make it fit with the story’s future. Then this happy period comes to an end. The story is finished. You have to reread not the work of the day before but the entire narrative. You’re afraid. You test it here and there, nothing is written as you had imagined it. The beginning is insignificant, the development seems crude, the linguistic forms inadequate. It’s the moment when you need help, to find a way to draw the ground the book rests on and understand what substance it is truly made of.

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 moment of serious reflection, they dilute the horrors of our time, they even save us from ourselves. Instead, when one writes one must never lie. In literary fiction you have to be sincere to the point where it’s unbearable, where you suffer the emptiness of the pages. It seems likely that making a clear separation between what we are in life and what we are when we write helps keep self-censorship at bay.

Scateni: Your writing does not seem to be written for readers; rather, it seems to have originated as private writing, without any interlocutor but the page (or the computer) or yourself. Is that true?

Ferrante: No, I don’t think so. I write so that my books will be read. But while I’m writing that isn’t what counts; what counts is finding the energy to dig deeply into the story I’m telling. The only moment of my life in which I don’t let myself be disturbed by anyone is when I’m searching to find the words to go beyond the surface of an obvious gesture, a banal phrase. It doesn’t even frighten me to discover that the digging is futile, and under the surface there’s nothing.

[...] Olga is a woman of today who knows that she can’t react to abandonment by breaking down. In life, as in writing, the effect of this new knowledge interests me: how she acts, what resistance she offers, how she fights against the wish to die and gains the time necessary to learn to bear her suffering, what stratagems or fictions she employs in order to accept life again.

Ferrante: There is no story that doesn’t have roots in the feeling that the writer has about life. The more that feeling filters into the story, into the characters, the more distinctly the page gives form to an incisive effect of truth. But what counts, in the end, is what I would call the graphic quality of that effect, the ways in which the writing achieves it and enhances it.

Jensen: What is the theme that you were interested in investigating through Olga’s story?

Ferrante: I wanted to tell a story of disintegration. Someone who takes love away from us devastates the cultural structure we’ve worked on all our lives, deprives us of that sort of Eden that until that moment had made us appear innocent and lovable. Human beings give the worst of themselves when their cultural clothes are torn off, and they find themselves facing the nakedness of their bodies, they feel the shame of them. In a certain sense the loss of love is the common experience closest to the myth of the expulsion from the earthly paradise: it’s the violent end of the illusion of having a heavenly body, it’s the discovery of one’s own dispensability and perishability.

Ferrante: In my intentions Mario, Olga’s husband, is neither cowardly nor a scoundrel. He’s just a man who has stopped loving the woman he lives with and comes up against the impossibility of breaking that bond without humiliating her, without hurting her. His behavior is that of a human being who deprives another human being of his love. He knows it’s a terrible action, but his need for love has taken other pathways, and he can’t do anything but fulfill it. Meanwhile he takes time, he tries to slow down the effects of the wound that he has inflicted. Mario is an ordinary person who is facing the discovery that to do harm is often painfully inevitable.

[...] I was afraid that there was a break between the before—archaic models and myths, precisely—and the after, Olga the new woman, and that Olga would seem to be an expression of the progressive fates of the female gender. I decided instead to deepen the confusion of time, as in Troubling Love, where what was Amalia is never different from what is Delia, and so only at the end can Delia state as a goal, as the high point of her own vital expansion, the positive result of her whole journey: Amalia had been, I was Amalia. I wanted the past not to be overcome but to be redeemed, precisely as a storehouse of sufferings, of rejected ways of being.