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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.
troubling love. i like the last sentence
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.
deleted paragraphs from days of abandonment
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.