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, I should accept the fact, understand the normality of his betrayal from the norm of my games of seduction. But why had he crossed the line whereas I hadn’t? I reflected. There are those who stop and those who don’t, and we can’t understand what sets us off down the slope and what blocks us. Over the years my occasions for little flirtations multiplied, and they became a secret vice, I knowingly sought them in order to repeat the sensation they gave me of a full life. When they began, I got from them greater consideration for myself, I suffered less from my duties as a wife and mother who no longer worked, they made me feel like reading, studying, writing again. Above all, I suddenly marveled at what I looked like, my mouth, eyes, breasts; I went to the hairdresser more often, bought new underwear and clothes. Time was marked by occasional encounters with my current admirer, men who were charming and so charmed me, never sought out, at most encouraged by the sum of circumstances—the presentation of a book, a party I decided to go to only because I knew he would be there. In those circumstances even sensitivity was as if heightened. If in the course of a walk or a drive a passionate phrase crossed the smell of burned stubble or simply of gas in the traffic, the burning, the gas that ran from the pump to fill up the tank began to excite me even when the possible lover had ended in nothing, without real events.

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 home she was diminished to a bundle of rags sitting on a chair, when she went out she endowed her body with the pride of the stunning appearance, the silver-screen splendor of the open-air cinemas on summer nights at the sea. She was a timid woman, yet in the way she dressed she demonstrated a boldness, an imagination that frightened and humiliated me. The more I hated her dressing up, the more, once outside, I felt around her my father’s alarm, the admiration of other men, their overexcited talk, the effort at gaiety intended to please her, the envy and the insult for the way she could make herself beautiful. The effect my mother had in a tram, in the funicular, on the street, in the stores, at the movies embarrassed me. The fact that she dressed with such care to go out, with her husband or alone, gave me the impression that she concealed a desperate disgrace, and I felt shame and pity for her. When, in the clothes she made for herself, she radiated all the light she could, that exposure made me suffer: seeing her decked out, I found her a badly reared child, an adult woman humiliated by ridicule. In those striking outfits I felt alternately seduction, mockery, and death. So a mute fury gripped me, a wish to ruin her with my own hands and ruin myself, and then to erase the false look of a diva’s daughter, the descendant of a queen, that she sought to give me by sewing night and day. I wanted her in her house clothes, that was my mother, even though I was pleased with her novel-like beauty. I wanted her without her flair for sewing. When I could avoid the clothes she made for me, I reacted with the desire to be sloppy: not to look like a pretty little daughter on special offer.

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 lead back to the same subservient dress, Harey’s terrible dress, the one that is on you forever, anyway, and there’s no way to get it off? I was anxiously searching for my path of rebellion, of freedom. Was the way, as Alba de Céspedes has Alessandra say, using a metaphor perhaps of religious origin, to learn to wear not clothes—those will come later, as a consequence—but the body? And how does one arrive at the body beyond the clothes, the makeup, the customs imposed by the everyday job of making oneself beautiful?

I’ve never found a definite answer. But today I know that my mother, both in the dullness of domestic tasks and in the exhibition of her beauty, expressed an unbearable anguish. There was only one moment when she seemed to me a woman in tranquil expansion. It was when, sitting bent in her old chair, her legs drawn up and joined, her feet on the foot rest, around her the discarded scraps of material, she dreamed of salvific clothes, and drawing needle and thread straight she sewed together again and again the pieces of her fabrics. That was the time of her true beauty.

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 their sins. Olga, on the other hand, is an educated woman of today, influenced by the battle against the patriarchy. She knows what can happen to her and tries not to be destroyed by abandonment. Hers is the story of how she resists, of how she touches bottom and returns, of how abandonment changes her without annihilating her.

Naturally not all those intermediate books give good results. Among the many ways of reading, I disapprove of the one that smooths, normalizes stories. Movie readings often run that risk. Film increasingly digs into literature absent-mindedly, in search only of a starting point, raw material. What in a text is anomalous or disquieting the film often considers a negative and eliminates or doesn’t even notice. It prefers to take from the book what is proved and what is assumed the audience will want to see and see again. It is therefore not the anarchic ransacking of a literary work that should worry the writer: a novel is written precisely so that its readers can appropriate it. Nor is there any need, on the part of directors with a strong authorial sense, to hide or deny by every means the literary origin of their own work: not to recognize their debts is a widespread vice and doesn’t in the least damage the work they are indebted to, at most it wounds the vanity of the writer. It is, rather, the cinematographic normalization of the literary text that is disturbing. To return to Gabrielle, although Isabelle Huppert gives the best of herself and Chéreau’s film engages us through the figure of the woman she depicts, we feel that the hospitality of Conrad’s words has been abused, that the woman on the screen is less disturbing than the anonymous wife of the page, that the shadowy house that the writer has built for us has been exchanged for a habitation that is easily habitable. This, and only this, should grieve those who love literature.

Dear Alberta, I feel that Delia, Olga, Leda, who are fictional characters, are very different women. But I am close to all three, in the sense that I share with them an intense relationship that is real. I believe that in fiction one pretends much less than one does in reality. In fiction we say and recognize things about ourselves, which, for the sake of propriety, we ignore or don’t talk about in reality.

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.

Ferrante: Nino’s traits are more widespread today. Wanting to please those who exercise any sort of power is a characteristic of the subordinate who wants to emerge from his subordinate position. But it’s also a feature of the permanent spectacle in which we are immersed, which by its nature goes hand in hand with superficiality. Superficiality is a synonym not for stupidity but for the display of one’s own body, pleasure in appearances, imperviousness in the face of the spoilsport par excellence, the suffering of others. Lila’s traits instead seem to me the only possible pathway for those who want to be an active part of this world without submitting to it.

[...] The twentieth century, besides, was a century of radical change for women. Feminist thought and feminist practices liberated energies, set in motion the most radical and profound transformation of the many that took place in the last century. I wouldn’t recognize myself without women’s struggles, women’s nonfiction writing, women’s literature: they made me adult. My experience as a novelist, both published and unpublished, culminated, after twenty years, in the attempt to relate, with writing that was appropriate, my sex and its difference. But for a long time I’ve thought that if we have to cultivate our narrative tradition, we should never renounce the entire stock of techniques that we have behind us. We have to demonstrate, precisely because we are women, that we can construct worlds as wide and powerful and rich as those designed by male writers, if not more. So we have to be well equipped, we have to dig deep into our difference, using advanced tools. Above all we mustn’t give up our greatest freedom. Every woman novelist, as with women in many other fields, should aim at being not only the best woman novelist but the best of the most skilled practitioners of literature, whether male or female. To do so we have to avoid every ideological conformity, every false show of thought, every adherence to a party line or canon. Writers should be concerned only with narrating as well as possible what they know and feel, the beautiful and the ugly and the contradictory, without obeying any prescription, not even a prescription that comes from the side you’re on. Writing requires maximum ambition, maximum audacity, and programmatic disobedience.

Ferrante: I publish to be read: it’s the only thing that interests me about publishing. So I employ all the strategies I know to capture the reader’s attention, stimulate curiosity, make the page as dense as possible and as easy as possible to turn. But I don’t think the reader should be indulged as a consumer, because he isn’t. Literature that indulges the tastes of the reader is a degraded literature. My goal, paradoxically, is to disappoint the usual expectations and inspire new ones.