“In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing” by Elena Ferrante

This short book is a mixture of the novelist’s rambling, half-baked ideas about how her mind works.

“I don’t recall ever thinking, when I was young, that I was inhabited by an alien voice…I felt that someone was telling me what should be written and how.  At times he was male, but invisible…I have to confess, I imagined becoming male yet at the same time remaining female… (1, p.24).

“I will tell you something that may seem contradictory.  When I finished a story, I was pleased…and yet I felt that it wasn’t I who had written it… (1, p.28).

Ferrante quotes from Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary: “I’m 20 people,” adding that “what writing captures doesn’t pass through the sieve of a singular I…The writer has no name” (1, pp. 30-32).

Much of the rest of this short, 111-page book talks about male vs. female issues in writing.  Ferrante abandons the multiple personality issue of being 20 people, both male and female.

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1. Elena Ferrante. In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing. Trans. Ann Goldstein. New York, Europa Editions, 2022.