“The notebooks of elementary school were certainly a cage, with their horizontal black lines and vertical red ones. There, in fact, I began to put down little stories in writing, and since then I’ve tended to transform things into neat narratives, orderly, harmonious, successful. But the discordant clamor in my head remains; I know that the pages that finally persuade me to publish books come from there. Maybe what saves me—though it doesn’t take much for salvation to be revealed as perdition—is that beneath the need for order is an enduring energy that will stumble, disarrange, delude, mistake, fail, soil. That energy pulls me every which way. Over time, writing has come to mean giving shape to a permanent balancing and unbalancing of myself, arranging fragments in a frame and waiting to mix them up. Thus the novel of love begins to satisfy me when it becomes the novel of being out of love. The mystery begins to absorb me when I know that no one will find out who the murderer is. The bildungsroman seems to me on the right track when it’s clear that no one will be built. Beautiful writing becomes beautiful when it loses its harmony and has the desperate power of the ugly.”
—
From In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing, Elena Ferrante.
