Frantumaglia: A Writer's Journey

"SC: I did not want to read Frantumaglia when it came out. It’s a collection of interviews, letters, little essays, sort of bits and bobs. I didn’t want to read it because I’m very uninterested in the question of who Elena Ferrante is—it really annoys me, and when the controversy was going on in the press I was really irritated by it. I didn’t want to read Frantumaglia because I didn’t want to see what she would say about herself and about her books. But then I read it for the purposes of writing The Ferrante Letters , and I love it. ME: Some of her best writing is in there. SC: It’s amazing. I love it because she has a real gift for saying just enough to unlock things for you, but not so much that you wish she would stop. She’ll draw some lines but not color all of them in. That’s a rare gift for an author, or for anyone. ME: I think she’s an enchanting describer of myth. To me, the most incredible parts of Frantumaglia are when she’s telling the story of Ariadne or the story of Dido. She has a fixation with weaving women, and that to me is the most interesting through-line of the book. She claims that her mother was a dressmaker, and there are these unbelievably luminous passages describing what it was like to accompany her mother to the fabric store to buy fabric and watch her fit clothes to other women. There emerges a parallel between making dresses—weaving fabrics together—and making stories—weaving language together. You see this in her retellings of weaving women who use fabric not to make dresses, but to create entire national cultures of narrative. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . SC: I didn’t sit down and read Frantumaglia all the way through; I dipped in and out of it. I did eventually read the whole thing, but only after trying bits of it. Some of the interviews are just unbearably long, but some of them I really enjoy because I like how indirect she is. She’s quite tantalizing and sometimes borderline rude, but also funny, which makes reading her interviews a joy. She always maintains her limitations, her boundaries. She always says exactly what she wants to say. SC: She’s an amazing model for tactics of evasion. But she does it in this way that’s so skillful. And all of the interviews have interesting things in them, but they’re not always answers to the questions. ME: It’s what’s gained from never doing face-to-face interviews. I would have liked to have had a longer back-and-forth with her. But she’s not interested in having a conversation or correspondence. I wonder if it’s partially a dialectic of the self: if you are somebody who feels unbound and fragmented, like you’re always working to pull yourself together, it makes sense that you would create a persona that’s incredibly bounded and disciplined about patrolling those boundaries. I don’t think she means to be tantalizing; I think she just doesn’t want to answer whatever question is being asked, but wants to give you something . SC: Right, like when you asked her what the books she read and films she watched and she answered, “I’ll tell you some other time.” ME: Sarah’s joke is that someday she’ll just drop a box full of novels outside my door. SC: With some dolls! But yes; the interviews seem more like prompts for writing for her. The way that she talks about her process sometimes; she’s always sitting down in her room, scribbling bits that go in her desk drawer. That famous drawer. ME: How often do you get to do prompted writing with another person? What would be the occasions for that, other than having somebody interview you? How do you do make it feel like a conversation even when that’s not what it is? That’s the challenge. SC: That’s what The Ferrante Letters is."