Besides, I confess that I don’t like a narrative that tells me programmatically what Naples is like today, what its young people are like today, what the women have become, how the family is in crisis, what ills Italy suffers from. I have the impression that such works are almost always the staging of media clichés, the poeticizing of a magazine article, of a television segment, of sociological research, of a party position. What I expect, instead, from a good story is that it will tell me about today what I can’t know from any other source but that story, from its unique way of putting something into words, from the feeling that it implies.

I wrote this story because it has to do with me. I was inside it for a long time. I kept shortening the distance between the protagonist and me, I occupied all her cavities, and there is nothing about her, today, that I wouldn’t do. So I’m exhausted, and now that the story is finished I have to catch my breath. How? I don’t know, maybe by starting to write another book. Or reading as many as possible on the subject of this story, and so remaining nearby, on the sidelines, and testing it the way you test a cake to see if it’s baked, poking it with a toothpick, pricking the text to see if it’s done.

I think of writing now as a long, tiring, pleasant seduction. The stories that you tell, the words that you use and refine, the characters you try to give life to are merely tools with which you circle around the elusive, unnamed, shapeless thing that belongs to you alone, and which nevertheless is a sort of key to all the doors, the real reason that you spend so much of your life sitting at a table tapping away, filling pages. The question in every story is the same: is this the right story to seize what lies silent in my depths, that living thing which, if captured, spreads through all the pages and gives them life? The answer is uncertain, even when you get to the end. What happened in the lines, between the lines? Often, after struggles and joys, on the pages there is nothing—events, dialogues, dramatic turns, only that—and you’re frightened by your very desperation.

To me it happens like this: I always struggle at first, it’s hard to get started, no opening seems really convincing; then the story gets going, the bits already written gain power and suddenly find a way of fitting together; then writing becomes a pleasure, the hours are a time of intense enjoyment, the characters never leave you, they have a space-time of their own in which they are alive and increasingly vivid, they are inside and outside you, they exist solidly in the streets, in the houses, in the places where the story must unfold; the endless possibilities of the plot select themselves and the choices seem inevitable, definitive. You begin every day by rereading to get energized, and rereading is pleasant, it means perfecting, enhancing, touching up the past to make it fit with the story’s future. Then this happy period comes to an end. The story is finished. You have to reread not the work of the day before but the entire narrative. You’re afraid. You test it here and there, nothing is written as you had imagined it. The beginning is insignificant, the development seems crude, the linguistic forms inadequate. It’s the moment when you need help, to find a way to draw the ground the book rests on and understand what substance it is truly made of.

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.

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: 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.

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.

Berlusconi the statesman is possible only thanks to his tendentious monopoly of the medium that best realizes and imposes that suspension of disbelief.

[...] 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.

Is it therapy, is it thaumaturgy?

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.

[...] 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.