Elena Ferrante is one of the most talked about novelists of recent years, with her biographical stories set in Naples – yet no one has ever met her. Deborah Orr talks to the enigmatic author, in an extract from the latest issue of the Gentlewoman.
Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym. Elena Ferrante does not exist. Which makes the acclaimed Italian novelist, whoever she may be, quite difficult to interview. For her fans, this is tantalising. Ferrante’s novels, particularly the quartet set in her hometown of Naples, have an autobiographical feel, and the author has done little to discourage that impression. One of the two women whose lives the books trace is called Elena, and is a writer, after all.
And given that the first of the four novels, 2013’s My Brilliant Friend, starts with the disappearance of Elena’s brilliant friend from childhood, Lila, and given that the only way to explain Lila’s disappearance is to describe their entire lives up to that point, there are plenty of questions to be asked.
The novels are an exploration not just of female friendship and rivalry, but a sociopolitical history of Italy in the second half of the 20th century. They take in the advance of girls’ education, feminism and political protest and also describe poverty, crime (organised and disorganised), the decline of industry and the rise of technology. Love, success, sex, family, ambition, creativity, genius and self-destruction – they’re all in there too.
These are rich stories, readable rather than didactic, and told very much from the narrator’s clearly subjective point of view. So, questions, questions, questions, and no one in sight who can answer them. Nevertheless, a limited form of interlocution can be undertaken, by email, with the writer who publishes her books as Elena Ferrante.
Deborah Orr: Usually, at this point in an interview, the writer sketches the subject and her surroundings. Under the circumstances, Elena, can I ask you to do this yourself, please?
Elena Ferrante: I can’t. I don’t know how.
D: Can we assume, then, that you see Elena Ferrante as a somewhat mysterious person, without a home, without a family, who exists inside your head?
Climbing the economic ladder has been very hard for me; I still feel a great deal of guilt towards those I left behind.
E: No, Elena Ferrante is the author of several novels. There is nothing mysterious about her, given how she manifests herself – perhaps even too much – in her own writing, the place where her creative life transpires in absolute fullness. What I mean is that the author is the sum of the expressive strategies that shape an invented world, a concrete world that is populated with people and events. The rest is ordinary private life.
D: Do you think it’s harder for women – especially mothers – to keep their creative lives and their private lives separate?
E: Women, in all fields – whether mothers or not – still encounter an extraordinary number of obstacles. They have to hold too many things together and often sacrifice their aspirations in the name of affections. To give an outlet to their creativity is thus especially arduous. It requires a great deal of motivation, strict discipline and many compromises. Above all, it entails quite a few feelings of guilt. And in order not to cut out a large part of one’s private life, the creative work should not swallow up every other form of self-expression. But that is the most complicated thing.
Read on The Guardian.com
