Ferrante: A story has a time and that time has to have a precise space within which to flow in a linear manner or rise suddenly into the present from the past, bringing with it traditions, ways of using the language, gestures, feelings, the rational and the irrational. Without a space that is drawn precisely, yet with broad margins of indeterminacy offered to the reader’s imagination, the story is in danger of losing concreteness and not gaining purchase.

Ferrante: I agree with you. A good writer—male or female—can imitate the two sexes with equal effectiveness. But to reduce a story to pure mimesis, to the technical skill with which it represents the experience of the other sex, is wrong. The true heart of every story is its literary truth, and that is there or not there, and if it’s not there, no technical skill can give it to you. You ask me about male writers who describe women with authenticity. I don’t know whom to point you to. There are some who do it with verisimilitude, which is very different, however, from authenticity. So different that when verisimilitude is well orchestrated it risks asserting itself to the point of making the truth of female writing seem inauthentic. And that is bad. And it’s the reason that the pure and simple genuineness of women’s writing is always inadequate: that I, a woman, write is not sufficient; my writing has to have adequate literary power.

Ferrante: I don’t know what results I’ve achieved as a writer, but I know what I aim for when I write. I don’t care whether the story has been told before: the stories that are presented to readers as new can always be easily reduced to an ancient core. Nor am I interested in revitalizing some overused tale by injecting into it a beautiful style, as if writing were the continual embellishment of a story. Further, I tend not to deconstruct time, or space, when it would be more a proof of skill than a narrative necessity. I describe common experiences, common wounds, and my biggest worry—not the only one—is to find a tone in writing that can remove, layer by layer, the gauze that binds the wound and reach the true story of the wound. The more deeply hidden the wound seems—by stereotypes, by the fictions that the characters themselves have tacked on to protect themselves; in other words, the more resistant it seems to the story—the harder I insist. Beautiful writing doesn’t interest me; writing interests me. And I resort to everything tradition offers, bending it to my purposes. What’s important is not innovation but the truth that we ourselves, out of prudence, or conformity, conceal within shapely forms, or, why not, within experimental exercises.

Ferrante: I have to start from an orderly place; I have to feel safe. But I also know that every book becomes in my eyes worth writing only when the order that has allowed me to begin shatters and the writing flows, and puts me, above all, at risk.

Ferrante: I’m very fond of The Lost Daughter. It cost me a lot to write. A story has to push beyond your very capacity to write it, you have to fear at every line that you won’t make it. The books I’ve published all originated like that, but The Lost Daughter left me feeling the way you do when you swim until you’re exhausted and then realize you’ve gone too far from the shore.

Joos: Do you think that writing about female characters from a female perspective requires courage? And, if not, why, in your view, has it been done so rarely and with so little care?

Ferrante: I don’t know if it takes courage. Certainly you have to get beyond the female gender, beyond the image, that is, that men have sewed onto us and that women attribute to themselves as if it were their true nature. You have to project beyond the great male literary tradition, which is arduous but easier than it was a century ago: we have an outstanding female tradition, which by now has some real high points. But above all we have to look beyond the new image of woman that has been constructed in the daily struggle with the patriarchy; this image is essential on the social, cultural, political plane but dangerous for literature. The writer has to tell what she truly knows or thinks she knows, even if it contradicts the ideological structures that she subscribes to.

Ferrante: Inconvenient truths are the salt of literature. They don’t guarantee that the results will be good, but it’s where words derive their power and flavor.

Ferrante: In general, we store away our experiences and make use of timeworn phrases—nice, ready-made, reassuring stylizations that give us a sense of colloquial normality. But in this way, either knowingly or unknowingly, we reject everything that, to be said fully, would require effort and a torturous search for words. Honest writing forces itself to find words for those parts of our experience that are hidden and silent. On one hand, a good story, or, rather, the kind of story I like best, narrates an experience—for example, friendship—following specific conventions that render it recognizable and riveting; on the other hand, it sporadically reveals the magma running beneath the pillars of convention. The fate of a story that tends toward truth by pushing stylizations to their limit depends on the extent to which the reader really wants to face up to herself.

In short, I am a passionate reader of feminist thought. Yet I do not consider myself a militant; I believe I am incapable of militancy. Our heads are crowded with a very heterogeneous mix of material, fragments of time periods, conflicting intentions that cohabit, endlessly clashing with one another. As a writer I would rather confront that overabundance, even if it is risky and confused, than feel that I’m staying safely within a scheme that, precisely because it is a scheme, always ends up leaving out a lot of real stuff because it is disturbing. I look around. I compare who I was, what I have become, what my friends have become, the clarity and the confusion, the failures, the leaps forward. Girls like my daughters appear convinced that the freedom they’ve inherited is part of the natural state of affairs and not the temporary outcome of a long battle that is still being waged, and in which everything could suddenly be lost. As far as the male world is concerned, I have erudite, contemplative acquaintances who tend either to ignore or to recast with polite mockery the literary, philosophical, and all other categories of work produced by women. That said, there are also very fierce young women, men who try to be informed, to understand, to sort through the countless contradictions. In short, cultural struggles are long, full of contradictions, and while they are happening it is difficult to say what is useful and what isn’t. I prefer to think of myself as being inside a tangled knot; tangled knots fascinate me. It’s necessary to recount the tangle of existence, as it concerns both individual lives and the life of generations. Seeking to unravel things is useful, but literature is made out of tangles.

Ferrante: I don’t know. I do think, though, that if a woman writer wants to achieve her utmost, she has to impose on herself a sort of systematic dissatisfaction. We compare ourselves with giants. The male literary tradition has an abundance of marvelous works, and offers a form for everything possible. The would-be writer must know the tradition thoroughly and learn to reuse it, bending it as needed. The battle with the raw material of our experience as women requires authority above all. Further, we have to fight against submissiveness, and boldly, in fact proudly, seek a literary genealogy of our own.