Elena Ferrante's Incidental Inventions

“A young woman I’m very fond of said to me: it’s always a problem with men, I’ve had to learn not to overdo. She meant that she had trained herself not to bee too beautiful, too intelligent, too considerate, too independent, too generous, too aggressive, too nice. The “too” of a woman produces violent male reactions and , in addition, the enmity of

“Maybe the first step in the a real break with the past should be—in the era of the web and YouPorn—a female story that, while its subject is sex, isn’t aphrodisiac. It’s possible that our true erotic self, to begin to express itself, has need of this beginning.”

The Male Story of Sex, 14 April 2018

“I have no liking for the throne we have assigned ourselves by declaring that we are beloved children of God and lords of the universe.”

-Trembling, 21 April 2018

“Men have always been jealous of that experience which is ours alone, and often dreamed—in myths, in certain rites—of forms of male pregnancy. Not only that: they immediately appropriated conception and birth metaphorically. They conceive ideas, give birth to works. And they have convinced us that since we already have the animal prerogative of mat

“Sometimes I think that exclamation marks are a sign not of emotional exuberance but of aridity, of a lack of trust in written communication”

-The Exclamation Point, 31 March 2018

“Friendship isn’t constantly put at risk by sexual practices, by how much danger there is in the mixture of lofty emotions and the pressure of bodies to give and be given pleasure.

It’s true that today, from what I can see, sexual friendship is increasingly widespread (in Italian, I’ve sometimes heard the lighthearted neologism trombamico, or “frien

“And the skill of the writer is best displayed when what she suggests is much more than what she says…

I’m interested in the ordinary or, rather, what we have forced inside the uniform of the ordinary…

But I still think that those who are more or less arbitrarily given the job of telling stories shouldn’t be concerned about the serenity of individual

“I am trying to make fiction by following a course that Gogol summarised like this: Give me any small everyday event and I will make it a five-act play.”

“In other words, my effort at faithfulness cannot be separated from the search for coherence, the imposition of order and meaning, even the imitation of the lack of order and meaning. Because writi