The author of the Neapolitan quartet and the Pulitzer prize-winning novelist discuss identity, ambition, truth – and the ‘convulsive’ urge to write.
“Here is what I believe: it is the pressure between the lines of the text, and the pressure rising up from under the text, and the pressure that is running above the text, that gives the writing its meaning, it is the unwritten sitting right next to the written, which makes something go beyond the explanation of the team of experts. And this is what happens when you go outside the margins (if I understand you correctly) and it is this which is mysterious, that we aim for.”
“No matter how love for others and language as an act of love try continuously, insistently, desperately to get outside the margins of the suffocating first-person singular, we remain bodies organically enclosed in our isolation. Once I recognised this, I was convinced that the other can be truthfully described only through an “I” that is colliding and in the collision unravels.”
Elena Ferrante and Elizabeth Strout, “‘I felt different as a child. I was nearly mute’: Elena Ferrante in conversation with Elizabeth Strout,” The Guardian, March 5, 2022.