Ferrante: I almost immediately discarded the idea of deploying passages of Lena’s books as well as of Lila’s notebooks. Their objective quality doesn’t count much for the purposes of the story. What’s important is that Lena, in spite of her success, feels her works as the pale shadow of those which Lila would have written; in fact she perceives herself the same way. A story acquires power not when it imitates in a plausible way persons and events but when it captures the confusion of existences, the making and unmaking of beliefs, the way fragments from varying sources collide in the world and in our heads.

Aguilar: When Lena recalls the presentations she gives during the book tours, she seems to realize that she has used the lives of others. The same thing happens when she writes the novel about her childhood neighborhood. Do you think that fiction writing always involves some sense of guilt?

Ferrante: Absolutely yes. Writing—and not only fiction—is always an illicit appropriation. Our singularity as authors is a small note in the margin. The rest we take from the repository of those who have written before us, from the lives, from the most intimate feelings of others. Without the authorization of anything or anyone.

Orr: Philip Roth says that “discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists.” How far would you agree with him on this?

Ferrante: I prefer to call it illicit appropriation rather than indiscretion. Writing for me is a dragnet that carries everything along with it: expressions and figures of speech, postures, feelings, thoughts, troubles. In short, the lives of others. Not to mention the ransacking of the enormous warehouse that is literary tradition.

[...] you’re ashamed of your presumptuousness, because there is nothing that can justify it, not even success. However I state it, the fact remains that I have assumed the right to imprison others in what I seem to see, feel, think, imagine, and know. Is it a task? A mission? A vocation? Who called on me, who assigned me that task and that mission? A god? A people? A social class? A party? The culture industry? The lowly, the disinherited, the lost causes? The entire human race? The elusive subject that is women? My mother, my women friends? No—by now everything is simple, and it’s blindingly obvious that I alone authorized myself. I assigned myself, for motives that are obscure even to me, the job of describing what I know of my era, that is—in its simplest form—what happened under my nose, that is to say the life, the dreams, the fantasies, the speech of a narrow group of people and events, within a restricted space, in an unimportant language made even less important by the use I make of it. One tends to say: let’s not overdo it, it’s only a job. It may be that things are like that now. Things change and the verbal vestments in which we wrap them change. But pride remains. I remain, I who spend a large part of my day reading and writing, because I have assigned myself the task of describing. And I cannot soothe myself by saying: it’s a job. When did I ever consider writing a job? I’ve never written to earn a living. I write to bear witness to the fact that I have lived and have sought a means of measuring myself and others, since those others couldn’t or didn’t know how or didn’t want to do it. What is this if not pride? And what does it imply if not, “You don’t know how to see me and see yourselves, but I see myself and I see you?” No, there is no way around it. The only possibility is to learn to put the “I” in perspective, to pour it into the work and then go away, to consider writing the thing that separates from us the moment it’s complete, one of the many collateral effects of an active life.