Elena Ferrante (post 3): Reports that her identity has been discovered fail to address her puzzling reasons for anonymity and the possible explanation.

In a 2014 interview with The New York Times, conducted via email, Elena Ferrante gave this puzzling explanation for her anonymity: “What counts most for me is to preserve a creative space that seems full of possibilities, including technical ones,” she wrote. “The structural absence of the author affects the writing in a way that I’d like to continue to explore.”

In my post of December 10, 2014, I quoted another of her puzzling explanations:

EW: Why are you living out the bold decision to write under a pseudonym?

ELENA FERRANTE: Anyone who writes knows that the most complicated thing is the rendering of events and characters in such a way that they are not realistic but real. In order for this to happen it is necessary to believe in the story one is working on. I gave my name to the narrator to make my job easier. Elena is, in fact, the name that I feel is most mine. Without reserve, I can say that my entire identity is in the books I write.

—Email interview by Karen Valby, Sept. 5, 2014, in Entertainment Weekly

If the novelist has multiple personality, and one of her alternate personalities is named Elena Ferrante, what she says could make sense.

Supportive of the possibility that she has a normal version of multiple personality, my post of January 23, 2015 showed that the first-person narrator of her very first novel, Troubling Love (1992), has unacknowledged multiple personality.