Ferrante: I’ve received letters that speak of this double effect. I think it depends on the fact that, when I write, it’s as if I were butchering eels. I pay little attention to the unpleasantness of the operation and use the plot, the characters, as a tight net to pull up from the depths of my experience everything that is alive and writhing, including what I myself have driven away as far as possible because it seemed unbearable. In the first drafts, I must admit, there is always much more than what I later decide to publish. It’s my own fastidiousness that censors me. I feel, nevertheless, that this is not always the right thing to do, and often I reintegrate what I’ve eliminated. Or I wait for an occasion to use elsewhere the passages that were taken out.