Literary Birthday – 5 April – Elena Ferrante

Happy Birthday, Elena Ferrante, born on 5 April 1943.

Elena Ferrante Quotes

1. Imagination is said to be a function of memory. I prefer to think that it’s a function of nostalgia. We compose stories knowing very well that we are the last to arrive. (Brickmag)
2. I’ve never worshipped books. I’ve always had a sense of the provisional nature of forms—the world changes continuously and what seemed to us inconceivable soon becomes a habit. I admit, however, that I do worship writing. Everything will change, but I can’t imagine the end of the possibility of writing, with whatever tool, on whatever surface. (Brickmag)
3. When I write, I myself am amazed at what emerges from the fog and becomes clear, establishes connections, finds junctions. Yet I should clarify here that not even this simple movement from confusion to story has ever seemed to me sufficient. The problem for me is naturalness of tone and preserving the truth. If, in telling a story, the writing loses truth, I throw it away. (Brickmag)
4. I’ve never considered writing to be a form of therapy. Writing for me is something entirely different: it’s twisting the knife in the wound, which can hurt a lot. I write like those people who take airplanes all the time because they have to but are afraid they won’t make it, they suffer during the whole flight, and when they land they’re happy though reduced to a limp rag. (The Guardian)
5. The decisive point for me is to arrive, starting from nothing, at a dense, chaotic draft. The work on the draft is gruelling. It takes a lot of energy to get a text with a beginning, an end, and its own crowded vitality. It’s a slow approach, like tailing a life form that has no defined physiognomy. (The Guardian)
6. I start again from the beginning. I remove entire sections, I rewrite a lot, I change the direction and even the nature of the characters, I add parts that, only now that there’s a text, come to mind and seem necessary, I develop episodes that were barely alluded to, I change the chronology of certain events, I very often retrieve pages that were discarded – early, longer, perhaps uglier, but more immediate versions. (The Guardian)
7. I don’t think anyone really knows how a story takes shape. When it’s done you try to explain how it happened, but every effort, at least in my case, is insufficient. There is a before, made up of fragments of memory, and an after, when the story begins. (The Paris Review)
8. From the first lines, I strive for a tone that is placid but with ­unexpected wrinkles. (The Paris Review)
9. The most urgent question for a writer may seem to be, What experiences do I have as my material, what experiences do I feel able to narrate? But that’s not right. The more pressing question is, What is the word, what is the rhythm of the sentence, what tone best suits the things I know? Without the right words, without long practice in putting them together, nothing comes out alive and true. (The Paris Review)
10. Literary truth is entirely a matter of wording and is directly proportional to the energy that one is able to ­impress on the sentence. And when it works, there is no stereotype or cliché of popular literature that resists it. It reanimates, revives, subjects ­everything to its needs. (The Paris Review)
11. Writers should be concerned only with narrating what they know and feel—beautiful, ugly, or contradictory—without succumbing to ideological conformity or blind adherence to a canon. Writing requires maximum ambition, maximum audacity, and programmatic disobedience. (The Paris Review)
12. I never plan my stories. A detailed outline is enough for me to lose interest in the whole thing. Even a brief oral summary makes the desire to write what I have in mind vanish. I am one of those who begin to write knowing only a few essential features of the story they intend to tell. The rest they discover line by line. (LA Times)
13. In life, as in novels, we are aware of the pain of others. We feel their suffering only when we learn to love them. (LA Times)
14. Writing is a skill, it’s a forcing of our natural limits, it requires long training to assimilate techniques, use them with increasing expertise and invent new ones, if we find we need them. (LA Times)
15. I write anywhere. I don’t have a room of my own. I know that I’d like a bare space, with white, empty walls. But it’s more an aestheticizing fantasy than a real necessity. When I write, if it’s really going well, I soon forget where I am. (LA Times)

Elena Ferrante is a pseudonymous Italian novelist who has kept her true identity secret. Her books, originally published in Italian, have sold in the millions and have been translated into many languages. Her work explores the complexities and contradictions of being a contemporary, educated woman. Female narrators describe their ambivalence toward motherhood, the tedium of sex, and the effort to preserve an identity within a traditional marriage. Her four-book series of Neapolitan Novels (My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child) are her most widely known works. In 2003, Ferrante published Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey, which sheds light on her background. She is the author of The Days of Abandonment, Troubling Love, and The Lost Daughter, now a film directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal. My Brilliant Friend, the HBO series, premiered in 2018 and is in its third season. Ferrante’s most recent novel is the instant New York Times bestseller, The Lying Life of Adults. A collection of original essays on reading and writing, In the Margins was published in 2022.

by Amanda Patterson

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