“In the Margins” by Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein)

This is a collection of lectures written by Ferrante and given by an actress in her stead. Together, they focus on the process of writing, as well as the value of reading widely and deeply. Ferrante asserts, “The way we see ourselves dragging outside, by means of the written word, an imaginary “inside,” which is by its nature fleeting deserves more attention…. Everything begins with pencil and paper. Then a surprising split takes place: the I of the writer separates from its own thought and, in the separation, sees that thought…. When I write, not even I know who I am.”

Ferrante stresses that the task of writing begins with the readings that are already inside you. “My work, in fact, is founded on patience. I start from writing that is planted firmly in tradition, and wait for something to erupt and throw the papers into disarray…. The only thing we can’t do without, in literature and any other place, is form.” She begins her second lecture by musing on the phrase, taken from Diderot, to “tell the thing as it is.” She admits, “I didn’t know how to get an exact reproduction of reality, I wasn’t able to tell the thing as it was…. It’s arduous to speak truthfully, but you do your best.” Her breakthrough was realizing, “I will therefore try to tell it as I can, and, who knows, maybe I’ll get lucky and tell it as it is.” In her third lecture, she points to the fact that when her fiction finally separated from realism, it became no less truthful. “With greater or less ability we fabricate fictions not so that the false will seem true but to tell the most unspeakable truth with absolute faithfulness through fiction.”

For Ferrante, the acts of writing and reading are inseparable. “We have to accept the fact that no word is truly ours. We have to give up the idea that writing miraculously releases a voice of our own, a tonality of our own…. Writing is seizing everything that has already been written and gradually learning to spend that enormous fortune…. Thus when I talk about my “I” who writes, I should immediately add that I’m talking about my “I” who has read…. Thus writing is a cage and we enter it right away, with our first line. It’s a problem that has been confronted with suffering, I would say with anguish, precisely by those who have worked with the most dedication and engagement…. No language and no writing are made by themselves. That is to say: the scribe has to study and become so skillful that it’s almost as if the word, in becoming writing, were running autonomously from inside to outside, from the heart to the page.”