IN THE MARGINS

Essays on fiction, reality, and identity from an elusive novelist.

In 2020, Ferrante had written three lectures to present, but the pandemic lockdown led to the cancellation of public events. As Europa president Sandra Ozzola writes in the introduction, “in November 2021 the actress Manuela Mandracchia, in the guise of Elena Ferrante, presented the lectures.” Separately, another Ferrante essay “was read by the scholar and critic Tiziana de Rogatis.” All four offer candid reflections on Ferrante’s development as a writer. Growing up in what she calls a “literary patrimony,” she at first tried to imitate men’s works. Gradually, she realized that, as a woman, her challenge was “to learn to use with freedom the cage we’re shut up in.” Among the many writers who have shaped her work, Ferrante cites Virginia Woolf, who inspired her to think about her authorial self as a plurality, and Gertrude Stein, whose book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas deftly subverted the autobiographical genre. Ferrante discloses the “passion for real things” that informed her early efforts: “I modeled characters on people I’d known or knew. I noted gestures, ways of speaking, as I saw and heard them. I described landscapes, and the way the light passed over them. I reproduced social dynamics, settings that were economically and culturally far apart. Despite my uneasiness, I let dialect have its space.” But she came to recognize that creating a sense of reality “was a game of illusion,” and fiction is indelibly etched with an author’s identity. “I can recount ‘out there’ only if I also recount the me who is ‘out there’ along with all the rest,” she writes. Ferrante offers insights about her complex protagonists, including Lila and Lenu, in her Neapolitan novels, and the first-person narrator of her most recent novel, The Lying Life of Adults, which she conceived as a story “in which you don’t know who the woman-character writing is.”

Enticing glimpses into a writer’s life. Let’s hope for a full-length memoir one day.