Elena Ferrante in her own words: ‘To relinquish my anonymity would be very painful’

“I don’t protect my private life. I protect my writing, I protect it from the same urgency to publish.” – Sydney Morning Herald

“The wish to remove oneself from all forms of social pressure or obligation. Not to feel tied down to what could become one’s public image. To concentrate exclusively and with complete freedom on writing and its strategies.” – The Guardian

“I have not chosen anonymity. My books are signed. Rather, I have withdrawn from the rituals that writers are more or less obliged to perform in order to sustain their book by lending to them their author’s expendable image. And it’s worked out fine so far. My books increasingly demonstrate their independence, so I see no reason to change my position. It would be deplorably incongruent.” – Vanity Fair

“Using the name Elena helped only to reinforce the truth of the story I was telling. Even those who write need that “willing suspension of disbelief ”, as Coleridge called it. The fictional treatment of biographical material – a treatment that for me is essential – is full of traps. Saying “Elena” has helped to tie myself down to the truth.” – The Guardian

“I’m still very interested in testifying against the self-promotion ­obsessively ­imposed by the media. This demand for self-promotion diminishes the ­actual work of art, whatever that art may be, and it has become universal. The media simply can’t discuss a work of literature without pointing to some writer-hero. And yet there is no work of literature that is not the fruit of tradition, of many skills, of a sort of collective intelligence. We wrongfully diminish this collective intelligence when we insist on there being a single protagonist ­behind every work of art. The individual person is, of course, necessary, but I’m not talking about the individual—I’m talking about a manufactured image.” – Paris Review

“I simply decided once and for all, over 20 years ago, to liberate myself from the anxiety of notoriety and the urge to be a part of that circle of successful people, those who believe they have won who-knows-what. This was an important step for me. Today I feel, thanks to this decision, that I have gained a space of my own, a space that is free, where I feel active and present. To relinquish it would be very painful.” – Vanity Fair

“I can say with a certain pride that in my country, the titles of my novels are better known than my name. I think this is a good outcome.” – The New York Times

“The fact that Jane Austen, in the course of her short life, published her books anonymously made a great impression on me as a girl of 15.” – The Guardian

“I wrote for a long time without the intention of publishing or having others read what I was writing. That trained me not to censor myself. What I mean is that removing the author – as understood by the media – from the result of his writing creates a space that wasn’t there before. Starting with The Days of Abandonment, it seemed to me, the emptiness created by my absence was filled by the writing itself.” – Paris Review

“Physical absence from the public sphere makes the writing absolutely central. In the writing itself – be it a book or this interview – which one organises and structures, the presence of the author becomes coherent. The rest is uninteresting private life.” – Sydney Morning Herald

“More than 20 years ago I felt the burden of exposing myself in public. I wanted to detach myself from the finished story. I wanted the books to assert themselves without my patronage. This choice created a small polemic in the media, whose logic is aimed at inventing protagonists while ignoring the quality of the work, so that it seems natural that bad or mediocre books by someone who has a reputation in the media deserve more attention than books that might be of higher quality but were written by someone who is no one. But today, what counts most for me is to preserve a creative space that seems full of possibilities, including technical ones. The structural absence of the author affects the writing in a way that I’d like to continue to explore.” – The New York Times

“Elena Ferrante is the author of several novels. There is nothing mysterious about her, given how she manifests herself – perhaps even too much – in her own writing, the place where her creative life transpires in absolute fullness. What I mean is that the author is the sum of the expressive strategies that shape an invented world, a concrete world that is populated with people and events. The rest is ordinary private life.” – The Guardian

“As far as I know, my readers do not despair at all. I receive letters of support for my little battle in favor of the centrality of the work. Evidently, for those who love literature, the books are enough.” – Vanity Fair

“When readers today think they are meeting the author, in reality they’re meeting a man or a woman, rich or poor in humanity, but who has already left their role as author. The author – and his capacity to develop the quality of the linguistic material to which he resorts – is present only in the works.” – Sydney Morning Herald

“If the author doesn’t exist outside the text, inside the text she offers herself, consciously adds herself to the story, exerting herself to be truer than she could be in the photos of a Sunday supplement, at a book launch, at a literary festival, in some television broadcast, receiving a literary prize. The passionate reader must be allowed to extract the author’s physiognomy from every word or grammatical violation or syntactical knot in the text, just as the reader will extract the sense of a character, a landscape, a feeling, or an action. So the writing becomes intimate both for the one who produces it and for the one who enjoys it.” – Paris Review

“For me the passion to write never coincided with the desire to become a writer. The passion was by its nature private.” – Vogue