Month: August 2020

It’s impossible to have a conversation about pop culture in 2020 without bumping into Sally Rooney. You know the drill: She’s the millennial voice of a generation. She’s overrated. She’s a literary genius. She’s a glorified romance novelist. Wherever you stand on her contribution to literature, there’s little argument when it comes to the TV show that brought her most recent novel to life: Normal People is a vivid study of young love and all the delirious crises of misinterpretation that come with it. Though Rooney is the architect of perfectly frustrating lovers Marianne and Connell, she got an assist in bringing them to the screen. Enter Alice Birch, the British playwright quickly becoming the most in-demand screenwriter on both sides of the Atlantic.

“I never wanted to write film and telly,” she tells me over a midweek Zoom call, her agitated fingers never far from the gold pendant hanging from her neck. “I thought I was going to be a playwright. My mother was worried. That was it.” Her fear was unwarranted: Birch, 33, has written some of the most innovative plays to hit the London stage in the last decade, gathering a collection of impressive drama prizes and descriptors like “a cluster-bomb of subversion” (2016’s Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again); “a gift for radical experiment” (Anatomy of a Suicide, 2017); and “a finely-shaded compendium of emotional pain” ([Blank], 2019). “It’s all about language for me, and words,” she says. “I’m endlessly interested in that—trying to find the most specific, correct words and being really, really meticulous about it.” Her first screenplay, 2016’s Lady Macbeth, catapulted actress Florence Pugh to stardom and won Birch the BAFTA for Best Screenplay the following year. Normal People, Birch’s first foray into television scriptwriting, brought her and Rooney their first Emmy nomination: Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series.

For Birch, the possibilities took shape in the two days she spent devouring the novel. “I felt profoundly moved by the end of it, that I had been on something with these characters,” she says. “[I] did something I never do: Emailed my agent and said, ‘Is this being adapted? I want to do it.’” Rooney was supposed to write the screenplay by herself, but the 12 scripts were too much for one person. “Sally had done drafts, and they were brilliant drafts. Novelists don’t always make excellent screenwriters,” Birch says.

She met the author in Dublin, where Rooney gave her the Normal People tour of the city—“It was like, ‘These are the steps where they have their conversation about this, and I think he lives in that flat up there, and she lives over here’”—but their collaboration was an isolated affair, with each sending notes upon submission of the other’s draft. Birch does most of her writing late at night—”it feels a bit more like there’s permission”—and always, always, always alone. “I read sometimes about writers sitting next to each other, or opposite each other, and I just start panicking. There’s something so intimate about it, and terribly vulnerable and private.”

The same could be said of the plot of Normal People, one of misinterpretation and unsaid affection—a striking departure from the riotous rage of Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again or the desperate, cruel rebellion of Lady Macbeth. “I don’t really think about anyone reading it or what the end bit of the process is, so that allows me to stay very much inside the characters and inside their psychology,” Birch admits. For Normal People, she wrote to executive producer and director Lenny Abrahamson’s style: intimate close-ups that put you right inside the characters’ heads. “The directions in the writing were very small, like, ‘She presses her lips together,’ or ‘Pushes her tongue against the inside of her cheek.’ It’s about like, fingers and mouth. It can all be quite delicate.”

Birch and Rooney are nominated for episode 3, which sees Connell snub Marianne as his date for the school dance—and almost immediately regret it. His agonized phone call in the episode’s final moments is an acute image of unmitigated remorse. But it’s the last two scripts Birch wrote solo—10, “the therapy episode” and the finale—that demonstrate her affinity for probing the depths of human connection. “That was the episode when they first called and said, “Do you want to be involved?” I was like, ‘I want to write that.’ I felt like I knew how to do that.” The episode sees Connell, rocked into near-paralysis by the suicide of an old friend, seek out a therapist on the advice of his concerned roommate. “We really had to work hard to earn that: To be able to feel like this character was in a space where he was able to suddenly say all this stuff he’d been holding onto,” she says. The result is a rush of raw emotion, a cathartic release of all the dodging and miscommunications built up over the previous five hours. Actor Paul Mescal, who lives near Birch in the city (“I see him, like, doing his running,” she grins) earned an Emmy nom for his performance.

Element Pictures / Enda Bowe

As for the finale, it marks the most obvious departure from its source material, giving Marianne more agency and the couple’s future an overall ambiguity. “It felt kind of like synesthesia, where we knew what it should feel like, but couldn’t quite find the words,” Birch says. “Every line of dialogue for ages felt like it was much too blunt or crass or on the nose. [It needed to feel like] these two people had finally learnt how to talk to each other, and how to sit with the unspoken stuff without misinterpreting each other constantly—that there was a total understanding. That should feel really profound, and the experience of it should be the same as the book, even if it’s slightly different plot-wise.”

But Normal People isn’t Birch’s very first TV experience. In the kind of opportunity that would be cliché in a script about Hollywood dreams come true, Jesse Armstrong, the British creator of HBO’s mega-hit family drama Succession, had seen Lady Macbeth and recruited Birch to join the show’s second season as story editor. Her title allowed her access to the writers’ room, but she didn’t write any of the scripts, and refuses to take any credit for the series’ brilliance—despite winning a Writer’s Guild Award for Outstanding Drama alongside the rest of the writers. “It’s [Jesse’s] baby, those are his characters, he owns them, but he creates an atmosphere where everyone has permission to pitch ideas about these characters and what might happen to them,” she says. “What should be exceptionally intimidating, there might be an hour where people are just telling jokes, trying to find the right joke for that character in that moment. It’s a very gentle room given that the show is so fucking not gentle.”

The Roys, a hyper-dysfunctional media family in the vein of the Murdochs, are brash, abusive, and unable to connect on the same plane. The concept of a “writers’ room”—the kind of place where, yes, writers work side by side—is more American than British, but Armstrong transported his to the South London neighborhood of Brixton. “The paper all over the wall, and the images all over the wall, sort of look a little bit like drunk people did it,” Birch says wistfully. “We could constantly hear some fight happening outside, or traffic—you know, London—and that feels really baked into it. Shows about wealthy people often just look so rich on the screen, sort of like you can’t almost look at it, whereas Succession isn’t like that. There’s a kind of pragmatism which I really enjoy.”

(For the record, she has no idea how a copy of Rooney’s first novel, Conversations with Friends, ended up in Shiv’s hands in the season 2 finale: “That’s some brilliant props person. Shiv is, of all the Roys, most likely to be engaging with Sally Rooney, but even that’s a little generous.”)

Now that Normal People is out in the world and nominated for four Emmys (Succession has 18), Birch is deep in several projects. “It’s that funny thing of being a freelancer, the potential to always be working, I feel a lot,” she says. “I’m not very good at switching off.” There’s Dead Ringers, the Amazon series starring Rachel Weisz as twin gynecologists, role(s) originated by Jeremy Irons in David Cronenberg’s 1988 psychological thriller. And of course, she’s working on the adaptation of Conversations with Friends, another collaboration with Abrahamson, Hulu, and BBC Three. In fact, she just submitted a draft of an episode. “At first it felt like we were cheating on Connell and Marianne,” she grins. “It’s the same world and they feel like they’re in conversation with each other, though it’s not intentional. You sort of keep expecting them to show up.”

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io

Emma Roberts just confirmed she is expecting her first child with Garrett Hedlund, her boyfriend of more than a year. Hedlund appeared with her in her announcement post—one of their first shots ever together on her Instagram.

This content is imported from Instagram. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Roberts and Hedlund have purposely kept their relationship pretty private since they were first reported to be dating in March 2019. Here’s what you need to know about Hedlund, from his impressive film career to his previous four-year relationship with Kirsten Dunst.

He’s a SAG Award-nominated actor.

The 35-year-old has said he fled farm life in Minnesota, where he was born, for the opportunity to become an actor. At age 14, Hedlund moved to Arizona to live with his mother and fly to auditions in Los Angeles, he told W Magazine. His first major film roles came in 2004, when he starred alongside Brad Pitt in Troy and Billy Bob Thornton in Friday Night Lights.

In the years after, he switched between starring in major blockbusters (TRON: Legacy, Unbroken) and smaller dramatic films (Inside Llewyn Davis, Billy Lynn’s Halftime Walk). More recently, Hedlund co-starred with Ben Affleck in the Netflix action film Triple Frontier and in 2017, he was nominated as part of the ensemble of Mudbound for a Screen Actors Guild Award.

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Hedlund and Roberts have been dating for just over a year.

Us Weekly reported that Hedlund and Roberts are expecting a child together. While the pair didn’t initially comment on the rumors, E! News reports that Roberts’ mom Kelly Cunningham confirmed the news. The outlet cited since-deleted Instagram comments Cunningham made when fans congratulated her on her daughter’s reported pregnancy. “Thank you so much! Very excited,” she responded to one Instagram comment. When another asked her if Roberts was pregnant, she replied, “Yes!!”

The pregnancy news is the first major update on Roberts and Hedlund’s relationship in a while. They were first linked in March 2019 after being spotted on a walk in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. A source told Us Weekly at the time, “Garrett and Emma have been friends, but this is new, casual and just a couple of weeks old.” Their romance came shortly after Roberts ended her engagement with longtime on-off partner Evan Peters.

BG015/Bauer-GriffinGetty Images

In January 2020, a source told Us Weekly that the couple was “having fun and enjoying each other” without getting too serious. “They are not talking an engagement or marriage at the moment,” the outlet’s source said. “They like hanging out and going out together, and their relationship is more fun than serious.”

BG020/Bauer-GriffinGetty Images

Hedlund appears with Roberts in their pregnancy announcement on Instagram.

Roberts announced that she and Hedlund are expecting a baby boy together on August 30, although they didn’t share the due date. Hedlund appears in the second photo she posted. “Me…and my two favorite guys 💙💙,” she wrote.

Instagram

Hedlund previously dated Kirsten Dunst.

Before Hedlund met Roberts, he dated his On the Road co-star Kirsten Dunst for more than four years. “I took her out on a 3 AM canoe ride,” he told Details of meeting Dunst on the 2011 set. “It was not a stable canoe. We fell out and had to swim back in mucky, shitty water, like golf-pond water.”

Todd WilliamsonGetty Images

They split in early 2016, with a source telling People, “They have very different personalities and weren’t on the same page when it came to their future. Their relationship has been very rocky for a while, so the breakup is actually a relief for them.” Dunst is now engaged to her Fargo co-star Jesse Plemons, with whom she shares a son.

He can sing.

In addition to Roberts and Hedlund being actors, both have sung over the course of their careers. Roberts sang and played guitar on the Nickelodeon series Unfabulous, while Hedlund sung in 2014’s Lullaby and did a duet with Leighton Meester in 2010’s Country Strong. E! News reported on rumors Meester and Hedlund were dating in real-life at the time, although nothing romantic offscreen was ever confirmed. She’s now married to The O.C. star Adam Brody and reportedly expecting their second child.

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

He’s also an avid reader.

Another passion the couple may connect on is a love of reading. During a 2012Interview Magazine conversation with Jeff Bridges, Hedlund said, “It’s funny that I got to do On the Road because the thing that had the biggest impact on me growing up was reading books.” He spoke to Details (via Us Weekly) the following year about spending his high school years at the local bookstore: “I’d hang out at the Borders Bookstore until it closed and then I would stick the book back on the shelf until the next day. That was safe. No one was going to buy three copies of [Charles] Bukowski‘s Tales of Ordinary Madness by the next afternoon.” Roberts, too, is a major bookworm, founding the online book club Belletrist in 2017.

Hedlund has no official social media.

Roberts rarely posts about her relationship with Hedlund to her 13.8 million followers. And it seems that there’s no official social media presence for Hedlund. She did share one photo with Hedlund in March captioned, “#throwbackthursday ❤️ *sorry mom for getting mad at you for posting this without asking* 📸 @kpreiss.”

This content is imported from Instagram. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Hedlund and Roberts both have kept quiet about their private life since being linked, on social media or otherwise. Roberts declined to speak about Hedlund during an interview for Cosmopolitan‘s May 2019 cover story. But she did speak about how she deals with media attention on her relationships. “I spend hours on the phone with my mom,” Roberts told the outlet when asked about coping with paparazzi photos. “She puts everything into perspective. She’s never once judged me. I also have the most amazing group of friends. They come over and we lie in bed or talk, watch TV, or read short stories to each other. We open a bottle of wine. To me, that’s the best whenever anything is going on—to have everyone come over and be together.”

BG015/Bauer-GriffinGetty Images

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io

If history is any indicator, Lady Gaga takes each year’s MTV Video Music Awards as a personal challenge to assemble the most ridiculous ensemble she can come up with. (Remember the meat dress? Is it possible to forget?) But nothing—nothing—could’ve prepared us for how the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent face mask mandate would force the superstar to up her fashion game. Naturally, the “Rain On Me” singer refused to disappoint. Her multiple looks at the 2020 VMAs made me question why I’ve settled for a boring navy mask when I could be wearing, I dunno, a space helmet? Horns?!

Gaga always manages to remind us to live a bit louder, a bit bolder, even in the midst of a year as chaotic and clouded as 2020. She puts safety first, even during a live, dance-heavy vocal medley that lasted well over eight minutes. Maybe if the rest of the world took wearing a mask as seriously as Stefani Germanotta, we wouldn’t be watching coronavirus cases spike across the United States. Honestly, I’d rather we all take up wearing Gaga’s first look of the night—a fishbowl on her head—than, y’know, just not wear masks at all.

“Be kind. Mask up!” the star told the VMAs audience. Fighting back tears, I nodded and said, “I will, Lady Gaga. I will.” But first I have to buy these masks. Surely her stylist has an Etsy shop?

Kevin Winter/MTV VMAs 2020Getty Images

Kevin Winter/MTV VMAs 2020Getty Images

Kevin Winter/MTV VMAs 2020Getty Images

Kevin Winter/MTV VMAs 2020Getty Images

Kevin Winter/MTV VMAs 2020Getty Images

Kevin Winter/MTV VMAs 2020Getty Images

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io

Bella Hadidi and The Weeknd had an 0n-again, off-again relationship, which eventually led to their breakup in August 2019. The two exes reunited on Friday at the New York City rehearsals for the MTV VMAs.

“They played it cool and crossed paths with each other, same place, same time,” a source at the rehearsal said, per The Daily Mail. The source added that the pair still appear to be “on good terms.”

Hadid was seen at the rehearsal wearing what the Mail says is a a mesh bodysuit from Nensi Dojaka, a graduate designer from Central Saint Martins. The Weeknd is performing at the VMAs while Hadid is presenting, per Variety.

This doesn’t appear to be the first time the two have spoken lately. “Bella and The Weeknd have been in touch recently,” a source told Us Weekly in early June.

“Bella isn’t dating anyone at the moment,” the source said. “She is so busy traveling and working nonstop and she’s mostly focused on her career right now.” But, the source added, “there’s always a possibility that they will get back together down the line.”

Hadid and The Weeknd met for the first time in April 2015, when she modeled for his Beauty Behind the Madness album.

“My motive was literally to work with her,” The Weeknd said in a Rolling Stone interview in October 2015. However, when she declined, “I was like, ‘All right, cool—we can meet up face-to-face.'”

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io

Five years after publishing the final installment in the Neapolitan quartet—the global literary sensation chronicling the friendship of two extraordinary women in four volumes (and later, an HBO/RAI series)—Elena Ferrante is back in Naples with The Lying Life of Adults, a brand-new story that probes the mind of a teenager grappling with facades, fictions, and a startling exposure to her roots.

Giovanna is 13, precocious, well-educated, and beloved by her fashionable parents—although, according to her father, she’s getting ugly like her estranged aunt Vittoria. Thus begins Gianna’s descent into the Naples of her father’s past: impoverished, lurid, ruthless, and endlessly fascinating. As Giovanna connects with her aunt and examines her family’s history and mythologies, she faces down the many discomforts inherent to the journey to adulthood.

In a U.S. exclusive, ELLE.com is proud to present The Elena Ferrante Interview, 28 questions from 28 of the countries that will publish The Lying Life of Adults on September 1. In Part I, Ferrante reflects on the plot of her new novel, her fascination with Naples, and the story of Elena and Lila. Click here for Part II, where the author discusses her writing process, the universal appeal of her work, and the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on women. —Julie Kosin, senior culture editor, ELLE.com

Part I

Marcello Lino, translator for Intrinseca, Brazil

Neapolitan dialect plays an important role in your novels, and for many of the characters is probably the natural expressive means. It is seldom manifested explicitly, however, and is, rather, described or expressed through an Italian with dialectal cadences. Could one say, then, that you, too, at times are doing a work of translation, hearing the voices of these characters in dialect and turning them into Italian?

Of course, but it’s a vexed, I would say unhappy, translation. To explain this I have to talk about the nature of the narrators I’ve constructed up to now. In my books, the narrator is the “voice” of a woman with Neapolitan origins, who knows dialect well, who is well educated, who has lived far from Naples for a long time, and who has serious reasons for hearing Neapolitan as the language of violence and obscenity. I’ve put “voice” in quotation marks here because it’s not at all about voice but about writing. Delia, Olga, Leda, Elena, explicitly or implicitly, are writing their story and in doing so resort to an Italian that is a sort of linguistic barrier against the city they come from. To varying degrees, they have fabricated for themselves—let’s say—a language of flight, of emancipation, of growth, and have done it against the dialect-speaking environment that formed them and tormented them during childhood and adolescence. But their Italian is fragile. Dialect instead is emotionally robust and at moments of crisis imposes itself, moves into the standard language, emerges in all its harshness. In other words, when, in my books, Italian succumbs and takes on dialectal cadences, it’s a sign that, in the language as well, past and present are getting anxiously, painfully confused. I don’t, in general, mime dialect: I let it be felt as the possible eruption of a geyser.

Király Kinga Júlia, translator for Parks Publishing, Hungary

In your previous novels, it could take a woman decades, if not a lifetime, to legitimatize her interests and emancipate herself. In this novel, on the other hand, Giovanna manages to overcome conditioning and routine in a magnificently short period of time. Is she a special case or is it because of a generational change, or has the success of the aspirations and efforts of our mothers contributed to our empowerment?

The Lying Life of Adults

bookshop.org

$23.92

Giovanna is very far from Lila and Lenù. She has had a good secular, super-democratic education. Her parents, both teachers, expect their daughter to become a very cultivated, respected woman who is free and independent. But a small event jams the machine designed for her, and she starts to see herself as the damaged product of a duplicitous milieu. So she desperately begins to cut her upbringing out of herself, as if she wanted to be reduced to the plain truth of her own living body. Lenù and Lila also try to tear the neighborhood out of themselves, but while they have to laboriously fabricate the tools to help them break free of real and figurative poverty, Giovanna finds those tools at home, ready to be used against the very world that has provided them. She is already armed for her revolt, so it’s quick and resolute. But to throw into disorder one’s cultivated “I” is a dangerous undertaking. You can’t change your form for one that seems truer without the risk of not finding yourself anymore.

Jiwoo Kim, translator for Hanglisa Publishing, Korea

Compared with the female characters, the “Ferrantian men” seem to be rather simple or dull. Is there a male character you consider a more positive figure with respect to the others or whom you are especially fond of?

Enzo. I like men who use their strength discreetly to help you live—without too many words, without sentimentality, without expecting compensation. Real understanding of women seems to me the highest application of the male’s intelligence and capacity for love. It’s something rare. I don’t want to talk here about rough, violent men, whose latest incarnation is the truly vulgar, aggressive types on social media and TV. It seems to me more useful to talk about cultured men, our companions in work and study. The majority continue to treat us like charming animals, giving themselves credit just for playing with us a little. A minority have superficially learned a formula for being “friends of women,” and want to explain what you have to do to save yourself, but as soon as you make it clear that you need to save yourself by yourself, the civilized patina cracks and the old, intolerable little man emerges. No, in all ways our manly educators should be re-educated. For now the only one I trust is Enzo, Lila’s patient companion. Of course, even this type of man may at some point get fed up and go, but at least he leaves behind a good memory.

Esty Brezner, bookseller, Ádraba, Jerusalem, Israel

In your opinion, to what extent can a person “leave Naples,” or reinvent herself far from her origins and the “destiny” assigned to her at birth?

I would begin by emphasizing that leaving is not betraying one’s origins. Rather, we have to leave in order to assign origins and establish them as the foundation of our growth. Wandering, we transform our bodies into crowded warehouses. New materials weigh on the original ones, modifying them by merging with them, blending with them. We ourselves seesaw between various ways of being, sometimes enriching our identity, sometimes impoverishing it by subtraction. But our birthplace endures. It’s the ground upon which our primary experiences stand, where we first exercise our gaze, first imagine, first express ourselves. And the more solid we find that ground to be, the more varied is our experience of elsewhere. Naples would not be my single true city if I hadn’t soon discovered, in other places, in contact with other people, that there and only there did I begin timidly to say to myself “I.”

Ana Badurina, translator for Profil, Croatia

In every one of your novels, the relations between women and men are very fragile and for the most part unhappy, while the truly formative experiences, in various ways, are those between women. Would it interest you to pursue, both as a writer and as a reader, a narrative in which a relatively “happy” relationship between a man and a woman was possible? Or do you think it would be hard for a story like that to be convincing in a literary context?

What isn’t convincing in literature is often the result of an edifying reading of reality. I’m not one of those who believe that happiness begins when the story ends (I’m thinking of the formula “And they lived happily ever after”). One can surely describe a happy couple: I’ve known many. Once I even wrote a story in which a very unhappy woman decided to conduct an investigation, just as in a detective novel, into the happy married life of her aging parents. I don’t want to bore you here with the development of that story. I will say only that you, Ana, summarized the whole story very well by using the expression “relatively ‘happy’ relationship between a man and a woman.” I think happiness can be written about, but only if that “relatively” is developed and if the reasons for the quotation marks that you’ve put around the word “happy” are examined.

Audrey Martel, bookseller, Librairie l’Exèdre (Gallimard), Quebec

In what way has Italy conditioned you as a writer, or, to be more precise, in what way has the place where your novels unfold influenced the stories and lives of your characters?

An important part of my experience occurred here, in Italy. What I care about is in this country, starting with the language I’ve used since I learned to speak, since I learned to read and write. But as a girl I was bored by everyday reality. The stories to be told were not in my house, or outside my windows, or in my language or dialect, but in other places, in England, France, Russia, the United States, Latin America, and so on. I wrote exotic stories that eliminated Italian geography and Italian names, which seemed unbearable to me, I was sure they would kill any story at birth. The great literature that inspired me wasn’t Italian or, if it was Italian, ingeniously found a way of avoiding the Italianness of cities, characters, dialects. It was a childish attitude, but it lasted until I was at least twenty. Then, when I seemed to know a fair amount about the literatures I loved, I began slowly to get interested in the literary tradition of my own country. I learned to use the books that made the deepest impression to give myself a sort of momentum to write about what until then had seemed to me too local, too national, too Neapolitan, too female, too much my own to be narrated. Today I think a story works if it can narrate what you alone contain, if it occupies an ideal place within books you’ve loved, if you write here and now, against this background you know well, with an expertise learned by digging passionately into the literature of all times and all places. As for characters, it’s the same thing: They’re empty if they don’t have some kind of knot that tightens at times, then loosens, a bond they may want to sever and yet endures.

Dina Borge, bookseller, Norli Nye Sandvika, Norway

What inspired you to write The Lying Life of Adults? Do you think that adults habitually lie about their lives? To others, to their children, and even to themselves?

As a girl I was a liar and was often punished for my lies. At around fourteen, after a lot of humiliation, I decided to grow up and stop lying. But I slowly discovered that while my childish lies were exercises of imagination, adults, so opposed to lies, lied easily to themselves and others, as if the lie were the fundamental tool that gave you consistency, meaning, allowed you to withstand the confrontation with your neighbor, to appear to your children as a model of authority. Something of this adolescent impression inspired the story of Giovanna.

Demetra Dotsi, translator for Patakis Editions, Greece

Smarginatura is one of the key words in The Neapolitan Novels, or, rather, to use Lila’s definition, her “sensation of moving for a few fractions of a second into a person or a thing or a number or a syllable, violating its edges.” Could one say that Giovanna, too, undergoes a sort of smarginatura, maybe in a permanent way, when the flimsy veil of her family’s perfection is lifted and she occupies a new image of herself?

Yes, now, as I’m answering you, I think so. But one must keep in mind that in Lila it’s a bodily reaction, in a certain sense a pathology. Smarginatura is the word she uses to designate an earthquake whose epicenter is a sudden dysfunction of the five senses. Giovanna to me seems closer to Elena, who in writing adapts the word used by Lila and accentuates its metaphoric value. In her, smarginatura comes to mean forcing oneself, overflowing the neighborhood, crossing borders, becoming something else and something else again, a tearing of veils with the suffering but also the pride that goes with it. Lila is physically overwhelmed by her symptoms; they’re so violent she gets sick. Elena and Giovanna dissolve their boundaries into metaphor, and metaphors hurt a little less

Elsa Billund, bookseller, Billunds Boghandel, Fredericia, Denmark

Why do you return to Naples in this new novel? What, about this particular place, needs to be narrated again and again? Can you imagine ever writing about some other place? And do you think it would be simpler or more difficult?

One can write about any place, what’s essential is to know it thoroughly, otherwise you risk superficiality. I’ve been in many places, and written pages and pages of notes. I have a lot of notes, for example, on Copenhagen, and I could use them in a story, as I’ve done, say, with Turin, a city I love. But they seem like places that don’t belong to me, and if I write about them I write about them to appropriate them. With Naples it’s different. Naples is already part of me, as I am of Naples. I don’t have to look for a view of Naples, I’ve had it since birth. I write about it again and again to see it and see myself and so that it sees me, more and more clearly.

Dr. Chen Ying, translator for Shanghai99, China

Naples is a provocative city, for better or for worse, and it’s always the protagonist of your novels. In The Lying Life of Adults, this city is divided into two worlds: the high neighborhood and the low neighborhood. In your new novel did you try to connect these two microcosms?

I’ve always been fascinated by the high-low opposition. With some simplification I could say that ascend, descend, rush down, reascend are verbs that I usually tend to construct my stories around. You’ve noted that in my new book the high-low relationship is central. It was the toponymy of the city that encouraged me to go in that direction. In Naples there is actually a neighborhood on the hill called Rione Alto, High, or Upper, Neighborhood. To get there you have to climb a narrow street called San Giacomo dei Capri. It seemed to me interesting that Andrea, Giovanna’s father, lives with his family in that Rione, thus making use even of his address to eliminate his “low” origins. It’s the daughter, Giovanna, who, in the course of her adolescent rebellion, discovers the artificiality of the boundaries that her father always wanted to accentuate. She violates the paternal order and drags the upper down and the lower up, so that she becomes the locus of the abrupt mixing of antithetical elements, the space where beauty and ugliness mingle, new and old, refinement and coarseness, as she mocks the yearning for distinction of her father with his newly acquired culture.

Stefanie Hetze, bookseller and owner of the bookstore Dante Connection, Berlin, Germany

For Lila and Elena, the experience of reading Little Women is extremely important. What (other) literary figures fascinated and profoundly affected you as an adolescent?

To answer I would have to make a long and probably boring list. Let’s say that I devoured novels in which the female characters had ill-fated lives in a fierce, unjust world. They committed adultery and other violations, they saw ghosts. Between twelve and sixteen I eagerly looked for any books that had a woman’s name in the title: Moll Flanders, Jane Eyre, Tess of the d’Urbervilles , Effi Briest, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina. But the book I read and reread obsessively was Wuthering Heights. Today I still find extraordinary the way it describes love, mixing good and bad feelings without any break. Catherine is someone who should be revisited from time to time: She’s useful, when you write, for avoiding the danger of sickly-sweet female characters.

Monica Linkdvist, bookseller, Akademibokhandeln, Stockholm, Sweden

Do you identify with any of the main characters in The Neapolitan Novels or in the new novel?

I will answer with a cliché: All the characters, including the men, have something of me in them, of necessity. If we know a fair amount about the bodies of others, the only inner life we really know is our own. So it’s relatively easy to learn to look, and to grasp a meaningful gesture, an expression, the features of someone’s gait, a way of speaking, an eloquent gaze. It’s impossible, however, to move into the mind of someone else: The writer always risks simplifications, like a psychology textbook, and it’s depressing. We have only our own mind, and it’s an arduous task to dig out of it some truth with which to animate fiction. There’s a raucous crowd in there that adds everything together amid conflict and confusion. Thus the inner life of another is in the end the literary product—always insufficient (too linear, too cohesive, too logical)—of an exhausting self-analysis helped by a vivid imagination. But you asked me to indicate a character I identify with, and I will tell you that at the moment I like certain features of Aunt Vittoria, in The Lying Life of Adults. It’s not me, but certainly I am glad to be her author.

Margarida Periquito, translator for Relogio d’Agua, Portugal

I’d like to know if Andrea’s remark in The Lying Life of Adults, which so upsets Giovanna, is an echo of Emma Bovary’s thought about her daughter “…comme cette enfant est laide!—how ugly this child is!,” a judgment that, according to what we read in Frantumaglia, you wanted to use in your own writing, to feel its weight and see if it could be a woman’s phrase.

Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey

bookshop.org

$15.64

Yes, but it’s not just a matter of literary origins. As a child, I long felt that remark of Emma’s as one that might concern me. I said to myself: wouldn’t it be terrible if my parents disliked not only my physical appearance but certain character traits as well? At least in part, Giovanna comes from the discomfort of that page of Madame Bovary combined with an anxiety of mine. As for whether such an exclamation—how ugly this child is!—coming from a mother even as frivolous as Emma is plausible, no, I haven’t resolved the problem. I gave the remark to a father, and yet, in the story, Giovanna’s mother doesn’t rebel, doesn’t contradict her husband.

Anna Yampolskaya, translator for Corpus, Russia

The city of Naples is among the protagonists of your books, including The Lying Life of Adults. What does this city—its streets, its inhabitants, its language—represent for you? As for the language: Have you ever thought of following the example of Andrea Camilleri—whose novels are often set in Sicily—and developing a particular language that mixes literary Italian and Neapolitan dialect?

Naples is a complex city, not reducible to a literary or sociological formula. I feel it as my city, the city of my forebears. It contains a long stream of experiences, my own and those of many people I preserve in my memory, with their voices. The voices, precisely. Naples is unthinkable without its dialectal sonority. Dialect moves through every level of society. I’ve known well-off, cultured people who had mastered various languages and yet, on every occasion, used Neapolitan, in its popular forms and in its finely crafted literary styles. But I have never had a good relationship with dialect, in either its harsher or its more engaging version. There are many reasons; here I’ll mention just one that, however, contains them all. But first I have to briefly describe an old upset of mine. Sometimes, especially as a young girl, when, for school, I had to translate Latin and Greek passages into Italian or put a hundred lines of sixteenth-century Italian, let’s say, into contemporary Italian, and was in a hurry—there was a lot of homework, the afternoon wasn’t long enough—I’d have a breakdown: I’d hear the languages as a flood of voices overlapping through time, a sort of theater in my mind, where the dead and the living were speaking all together in a roar that wore me out. That hallucination has passed, but not in the case of Neapolitan. There it endures, and in a way that goes far beyond that old impression of adolescence. Neapolitan seems to me to have such sonorous power, such a devastating emotional charge, that I don’t want to wrong it by enclosing it in the alphabet, like a tiger in a cage. When I write, I look at it, I keep it at bay, I use it with trepidation. And I always leave out its ironic-pathetic-sentimental-good-natured tonality. I prefer an aggressive, sarcastic tone, a threat for the women I’m describing.

Ioana Zenaida Rotariu, bookseller, St. O. Iosif, Brașov, Romania

How much do you think friendships change our lives?

A friend doesn’t change us, but changes in her quietly accompany changes in us, in a continuous, mutual effort of adaptation.

Muauia al-Abdulmagid, translator for Dar al Adab, Lebanon

In the fourth volume of The Neapolitan Novels you mention the universality of human violence and allude to the Arab world and Islamic culture: Dede’s husband is of Iranian origin and her son’s name is Hamid, etc. Might we, then, expect from Elena Ferrante a novel centered on the current conflict between Islam and the West, focusing on contemporary political themes such as racism, terrorism, immigration, and Islamophobia?

In addition, you allude briefly to one of the most memorable scenes in contemporary history: September 11, 2001. Do you see in it a concrete example of smarginatura, “dissolving margins”? Is there a visual connection between the collapse of the two towers and the earthquake that strikes Naples and terrifies Lila to the point where she sees people smarginarsi, or lose their outlines? Is smarginatura therefore a metaphor for violent metamorphosis?

I gladly return to the word smarginatura, Yes, it has to do with violence, but in the sense that it sums up in itself the effects of an uncontrollable force that breaks down the outlines of people and things. The artificial margins within which we are enclosed and within which we enclose others suddenly become illusory and can’t hold up, and the atrocious spectacle of destruction and self-destruction takes place right before Lila’s eyes. And even when, in the course of the story, the word shifts its meaning, and becomes a metaphor for growth, the revelation of truth, and so on, it is always accompanied by an idea of rupture, laceration, explosion. Our common life is full of disruptive actions; we can’t escape violence, even in figures of speech. I’ve written a lot about it, and—with regard to your first question—I would answer no, at this point it’s unlikely that I would write about terrorism, racism, Islamophobia: the end of the Neapolitan quartet is intended simply to indicate how Elena’s horizon has widened through her daughters, their husbands, grandchildren, is no longer fixed in the neighborhood but against the broader and very dangerous background of the planet.

On the other hand, I will continue to declare on every occasion how much I hate violence, especially against the weakest, but also violence of the weak against the weak, and even violence that is justified by the intolerable nature of all kinds of oppression. The human being is a fierce animal that has sought to domesticate itself through religion, through the admonitions of its terrible history, through philosophy, through science, through literature, through the hazardous connection between goodness and beauty, through regulating conflict in a way that is entirely male, from the duel to war. But up to now the result has been a widespread form of hypocrisy: war, for example, includes punishment for specific crimes called war crimes, as if it were not in itself, by its nature, an atrocious crime; human rights, which should be peacefully supported, are a permanent battlefield, are continuously violated or defended; the state claims it has a monopoly on violence, but first of all that’s not true, and, second, it’s far too obvious that that monopoly is abused: Broad portions of the global population know that they have to fear, above all, the government’s police, even where democratic traditions are strong. Nor are we women strangers to the practice of violence: This should be said emphatically. But we have been so relentlessly exposed to male violence, and so fully excluded from the means by which men have practiced it, that perhaps only we, today, can find a nonviolent way of banishing it forever. Unless, confusing emancipation with co-optation, we end up handing ourselves over, even in this, to the male tradition of aggression, extermination, devastation, at the same time making its learned rationales and petty regulations our own.

Part II

Enza Campino, bookseller, Libreria Tuttilibri, Formia, Italy

While I believe that the truth in your stories is the universal key that excites readers so different in terms of culture and geography (to know that Michelle Obama and a Chinese manager will read you, Madonna and a Turkish girl), I would ask how much your relationship with the reality that runs through your novels is influenced by that fact.

Writing is a very private activity. I’ve always written for myself, and much of my writing has stayed in my drawers. But whenever I’ve decided to make a story public, I’ve always hoped that it would go as far away from me as possible, that it would travel, that it would speak languages different from the one I wrote it in, that it would end up in places, houses, hidden from my view, that it would change mediums and become theater, film, television, a comic book. That’s how I’ve thought, and it hasn’t changed. My writing is very timid, while I’m writing, but when it decides to become a book it gets ambitious, it’s immodest. I mean that I am not my books—I don’t dare have a life that is autonomous the way they do. Let the books go as far as they can, I will continue to write according to my taste, how and when I feel like it. From the moment they put on an editorial guise and leave, my independence has nothing to do with theirs.

Lola Larumbe, bookseller, Librería Rafael Alberti, Madrid, Spain

Many characters in your novels are torn between love and friendship. Would you prefer to have with you forever a friend or a lover?

I would prefer a lover who is capable of deep friendship. This mixture is hard to understand when you’re young, but with maturity, if you’re lucky, it gradually opens new horizons. I’ve always liked finding in old correspondences between lovers expressions like “my friend.” Similarly, the appellation “sister,” which appears first in chivalric literature and continues for centuries, never seemed to me a sign of the decline of desire: on the contrary.

Suomalainen Kirjakauppa, bookstore, Helsinki, Finland

How did Lila and Lenù come to you? Why did you want to tell their story in particular? Is there something that you would like your readers to know about you? And in what way is living in Naples different from, say, living in Rome? What makes Naples unique?

Lenù and Lila are ghosts, like all those who live in writing. At first they show up as brief, fleeting apparitions, somewhat resembling people whom we haven’t seen for a long time or who are dead. We hold on to them with a few sentences, shut them up in a notebook, later reread them. If the sentences have strength, the ghosts reappear, we capture them with more words. And so on: As the chain of words acquires energy, so the feeble apparitions put on flesh and bones, define themselves, bring with them houses, streets, landscapes, Naples, a plot within which everything moves and has heat, and it seems that only you can give those indistinct forms definition, and even an appearance of real life. But it doesn’t always go well; in fact very often it goes badly. The ghosts get the address wrong, they’re too unstable, the words are false or lifeless, the city is only a name, and if someone asks you how it’s different from, say, Rome, you don’t know the answer, and you can’t find it in the more or less moribund sentences you’ve written.

Ieva Mazeikaite, translator for Alma Littera, Lithuania

Many of the protagonists of your novels leave the city of their birth as soon as they become adult. To what degree does this departure from Naples influence the development of the character?

Going away is important but not decisive. Lenù goes away, Lila never abandons Naples, but they both develop, their lives are full of events. As I’ve said, I feel close to Elena’s choices. We don’t have to fear change, what is other shouldn’t frighten us. But staying doesn’t seem wrong to me; what’s essential is that our “I” not be impoverished if we should confine ourselves to a space forever. I like people who are able to have bold adventures just going from one end to the other of the street where they were born. I imagined Lila like that.

Ivo Yonkov, translator, and Dessi Dimitrova, bookseller, for Colibri, Bulgaria

Why do you continue to return to a painful past? Is writing for you a form of self-therapy? And what do you think of the literature that is studied in Italian schools? Do you think it reflects the dynamics of the world we live in? What values does it promulgate? And are these values that you share?

No, I’ve never considered writing to be a form of therapy. Writing for me is something entirely different: It’s twisting the knife in the wound, which can hurt a lot. I write like those people who take airplanes all the time because they have to but are afraid they won’t make it, they suffer during the whole flight, and when they land they’re happy though reduced to a limp rag. As for schools, I don’t know much about how they work today. When I was in school, readings that as an adult I found marvelous were transformed into extremely boring exercises that had to be graded. School, in teaching literature, eliminated the pleasure of empathy and imagination. If you take the energy out of a sentence by playing around with that adjective or this figure of speech, you will leave on the page only pale alphabetic combinations and turn young people, in the best case, into refined con men.

Fleur Sinclair, bookseller, Seven Oaks Bookshop, Sevenoaks, U.K.

With so many events in a novel that begins with something that is said and can never be retracted, at an especially sensitive moment in Giovanna’s adolescence—I wonder if there is something that makes you want to go back and speak to your adolescent self (or maybe something you wish your adolescent “I” had overheard). Something that, in short, could have changed the course of your life, something that gave you confidence and the impetus to do earlier something that you did, or kept you from doing things that today you regret.

In our daily lives, what has been has been. We don’t talk about adolescence later: as far as I’m concerned it was a stagnant time, inconsolable. As an adult, I have always been careful not to say to an adolescent, even one who is apparently happy: lucky you. I think that the sooner this period ends, the better. On the other hand, writing about it is thrilling. I suspect that a little piece of adolescence peeks out in all books, whatever their subject, precisely because it’s a phase of thunder, lightning, storms, and shipwrecks. You’re almost a child, almost an adult, it takes an eternity for your body to get rid of one shape and assume another. Language itself doesn’t seem to possess the right form for you, sometimes you talk like a child, sometimes you express yourself like a grown woman, and either way you’re embarrassed. In reality the past doesn’t change. But, when you write, adolescence changes color inexhaustibly. Every fragment can find its place and suddenly gain its rightful meaning in the story. If you write, that static, asphyxiating time, observed from the edge of adult life, begins to flow, is made and remade, finds its motivations.

Fe Fernández Villaret, bookseller, L’Espolsada Llibres, Barcelona, Catalonia

First I’d like to tell you that I found reading the four volumes of The Neapolitan Novels a pleasure. As a bookseller I’ve recommended them to everyone, but they’ve been read mainly by women, because, from the start, they were classified as reading “for women.” Your books have a female outlook, but that doesn’t mean that they’re exclusively for women: on the contrary. In your opinion, why do books that look at the world through women’s eyes not interest men? For years life, history, and everything that happened has been recounted by them. Thank you for your contribution to making the female universe richer and more varied.

What to say? Men, including very cultured men, often don’t even try to read them, our books, that is. They consider them, as you point out, “for women,” and this formula not only seems to protect their virility from any possible degradation but above all denies us the gift of universality, a quality they attribute solely to themselves. They write books for men and women, whereas we can write only for women. It’s one of the many signs of how they continue to consider us human beings of an inferior grade. At times we ourselves seem to support them, practically exclaiming, like Euripides’ Iphigenia: “One man’s life is worth more than the lives of ten thousand women.” We have been brought up with the idea that a person of the male sex has, among his many marvelous prerogatives, that of encapsulating in himself the whole world. When a man produces a work—great, small, tiny—he automatically addresses the human race, Martians, Venusians, he feels ready for the possible and the impossible. We, they’ve told us, were not born for that. Their intelligence and talent are virtues. Our intelligence and talent are defects. To mention just one example, the extraordinary Baudelaire, to whom all of us, male and female, owe so much, wrote that feminine beauty lasts longer if it’s not accompanied by intelligence, and he underlined this by saying, in his provocative way, that to love intelligent women is the pleasure of a pederast. Things change, of course, and they are changing, but, especially deep down, too slowly. Even today, if I say that the very greatest literature isn’t universal, but only the very greatest male literature, I make people uneasy, and seem a little harsh. But it’s true.

Malgorzata Zawieska, bookseller, Korekty, Warsaw, Poland

In your books you confront an important question: the emancipation of women through professional life. What do you think of the possible effects of the coronavirus on the situation of women? Do you think it will make economic disparities worse, forcing us to take steps backward with respect to gains on the road to emancipation? Do you think this could be an interesting theme for a writer?

I’m still feeling the effects of the fear and disorientation at how easy it’s been for the terrible living conditions of the weakest on the planet to get worse within a few weeks. I’m not especially interested in the virus. It’s the fragility of the system that has frightened me, so much that I have trouble explaining it. I mean that everything was abruptly reduced. In an extraordinarily short span of time obedience ended up at the top of the hierarchy of values. And women have received more orders than usual, assigned, as they traditionally are, to forget themselves and see to the material survival of the family: feed, watch over, care for, isolate, isolate themselves, and meanwhile feel guilty for everything, as if until that moment they had had too many expectations. In this picture, the step backward seems inevitable, in order to deal with the primary demands: food, water, a roof, medicine. Yes, I believe that rather than the spread of the pandemic, what should be related is how the spread of fear changes us, taking meaning away from higher-level demands and fine ambitions, in short from all that “doing” that hums along when the economic-social-cultural system pretends to be solid. But, as I said, I have to think about it. For now, the problem is what to do to keep the matter of women central. It has to be felt as something fundamental.

Tim van den Hoed, bookseller, De Utrechtse Boekenbar, Utrecht, the Netherlands

The fascination that Naples exerts on me has brought me to the city twice. The four volumes of The Neapolitan Novels and my personal experiences in the city coexist and sometimes merge, like the many characters in the novels. To what degree was the use of different characters important in creating a portrait of Naples? And is there a secondary character that you feel closer to?

You’re right to emphasize that our gaze is our own and, at the same time, mixed into it are many other points of view expressed in novels and in various other ways. This is true for everyone and naturally also for a writer, who offers the public her own way of seeing, which is absolutely unique and yet anything but singular. Flowing into it, in fact, are forebears, geography, history, philosophy, sciences, books read, oral and written narrative techniques learned, many clichés, and, especially, the continual contact with others, the way the writer has deduced and imagined their feelings and thoughts, what is unsayable and yet, if she’s decided to tell a story, what she must find the words for. In the story of Naples—but also in the story of objects much simpler than Naples—all these things are set in motion, and for the most part the writer doesn’t even realize it. There is a continuous mixing, contaminating, even spoiling, that constructs a world that is fake but that, if it succeeds, ends up being more true than the truth: the truth that is right before our eyes but that we’ve never seen. Whether or not this result is actually achieved, the writer never really knows. Not even success assures him, in fact as soon as the book is finished the author becomes less substantial than the background characters.

As an author, if I have to tell the truth, I feel like the mother of the Solaras. She has the whole neighborhood in her fist, with that red loan shark’s book, and yet she’s a small woman, of minor importance. She appears only for a few lines, uncomfortable because of the heat, fanning herself.

Read the Neapolitan Novels

My Brilliant Friend

Europa Editions
bookshop.org

$15.64

The Story of a New Name: Neapolitan Novels, Book Two

Europa Editions
bookshop.org

$16.56

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay: Neapolitan Novels, Book Three

Europa Editions
bookshop.org

$16.56

The Story of the Lost Child: Neapolitan Novels, Book Four

Europa Editions
bookshop.org

$16.56

Readings Victoria, bookstore, Australia

What does it mean to you when you hear talk of “female writing”?

I will take advantage of this question of yours to explain. There is nothing wrong with saying “female writing,” but it should be done with caution. Since there exists experience that is unquestionably female, every expression of it, oral or written, should have the unequivocal stamp of a woman. But unfortunately it’s not so. Every means that we women make use of to express ourselves doesn’t really belong to us but is, historically, a product of male dominance, above all grammar, syntax, individual words, the very adjective “female” with its various connotations. Literary writing is obviously no exception. And so literature by women can only move, laboriously, from within the male tradition, even when it asserts itself forcefully, even when it seeks its own specific genealogy, even when it absorbs and, within fixed margins, makes the mingling of the sexes and the irreducibility of sexual desire its own. Does this mean that we are prisoners, that we are fated to be hidden forever by the very language in which we try to talk about ourselves? No. But we have to realize that, in this context, to express ourselves is a process of trial and error. We have to start constantly from the hypothesis that, in spite of so much progress, we are not yet truly visible, we are not yet truly audible, we are not yet truly comprehensible, and we have to remix our experience countless times, as one does with a salad, reinventing surprising voices for people and things. We have to find the very mysterious way (or ways) in which, starting from a crack, from something discarded among the already established forms, we arrive at writing that is unpredictable even for us who are working on it.

Ivana Dobrakovová, translator for Inaque, Slovakia

Up to now, you’ve always used the perspective of an adult narrator (Leda, Olga, Delia), or you’ve let the protagonist grow up (Elena) and then go back in time in the narrative; why did you change in the case of Giovanna?

I don’t think I’ve changed. But there is something different. I left the identity of who is giving literary shape to Giovanna’s “I” undefined. Reread, cara Ivana, the very short prologue, which alludes to a “tangled knot, and nobody, not even the one who at this moment is writing, knows if it contains the right thread for a story or is merely a snarled confusion of suffering, without redemption.” And while you’re reading keep an eye on “the one who.” I care deeply about this passage. My narrators are always thought of as distant from the narrated facts. They feel at the time they start writing that they are very different from what they were in the story, and they have to get as close as possible to what they were in order to succeed in talking about themselves. In the case of Giovanna the one who is writing is also removed in time from the events related and is having trouble with the story. But the fact that we could call new, for me, is that “the one who” isn’t necessarily Giovanna.

Ann Goldstein, translator

How do you work? Do you make a lot of corrections, and of what type? Do you consider yourself a good self-editor? Do you often make word changes or changes in the language?

The decisive point for me is to arrive, starting from nothing, at a dense, chaotic draft. The work on the draft is grueling. It takes a lot of energy to get a text with a beginning, an end, and its own crowded vitality. It’s a slow approach, like tailing a life form that has no defined physiognomy. Occasionally I can keep rolling along, even without rereading, but that’s rare. More often I advance by a few lines every day, writing and rewriting. Frequently I fall out of love and put it all aside. But that painful condition I will ignore for now. I want to tell you instead, cara Ann, that only when this preliminary labor has had good results does the true pleasure of writing begin for me. I start again from the beginning. I remove entire sections, I rewrite a lot, I change the direction and even the nature of the characters, I add parts that, only now that there’s a text, come to mind and seem necessary, I develop episodes that were barely alluded to, I change the chronology of certain events, I very often retrieve pages that were discarded—early, longer, perhaps uglier, but more immediate versions. It’s a job that I do alone, I wouldn’t share it with anyone. At a certain point, however, I need attentive readers, but readers who will focus only on my carelessness: mistakes in chronology, repetitions, incomprehensible formulations. I fear suggestions that tend to normalize the text, such as: don’t say it like that, the punctuation is insufficient, this word doesn’t exist, it’s an incorrect formulation, that’s an ugly solution, this way it’s more beautiful. More beautiful? Editing that’s alert to respect for the current aesthetic canon is dangerous. So is editing that encourages anomalies that are compatible with popular taste. If an editor says: In your text there are good things but we have to work on it, you’re better off withdrawing the manuscript. That first person plural is alarming.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io