At the beginning of Elena Ferrante’s last novel, The Lying Life of Adults (2020), the narrator recalls a moment of shame from early adolescence that left her feeling permanently untethered. “I slipped away, and am still slipping away, within these lines that are intended to give me a story,” she writes. Describing herself as “only a tangled knot”, she says: “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.”
The sense of self-estrangement, the ugly-beautiful imagery, the mood of anguish – these are the constants in Ferrante’s fiction, from her early first-person stories about desperate women whose lives are going to pieces to her Neapolitan Quartet that made Ferrante an international phenomenon – as well as the world’s most famous literary recluse. She has always been fascinated by the way reality is transformed into art. Who gets to tell whose story? What if the story I’m telling leads nowhere? Is fiction more truthful when seen behind a veil of lies?
These questions of neatness and truth rear up at the beginning of In the Margins, a slim book containing four lectures written by Ferrante, but delivered by actors last year. Their subject? Ostensibly, the “pleasures” of writing and reading – though it rarely sounds that pleasurable.
Ferrante has been acclaimed for her “singular”, “uncompromising” voice, and her “ruthless” honesty. But what emerges from the first lecture, Pain and Pen, is just how cramped and conflicted she felt trying to develop this voice. It was an agonising negotiation between a “compliant” style of writing that stayed “diligently within the margins” and a more “impetuous” approach, which allows “unexpected truth” to spill out on to the page. She traces her compliance back to elementary school, when she used notebooks with two vertical red lines to denote the margins.
These margins become a metaphor for the tension in her writing between “careful” precision and a more “unruly” instinct, where the words “erupt” and overflow (she also likes to draw on volcanic imagery). “Beautiful writing becomes beautiful when it loses its harmony and has the desperate power of the ugly,” Ferrante writes. She feels the same way about her characters: “I become passionate about them when they say one thing and do the opposite.”
Part of her struggle between compliance and unruliness was to do with her sex. Growing up in the “literary patrimony”, she was drawn to literature by men and initially tried to imitate their work. She was saved by a close reading of the Italian Renaissance poet Gaspara Stampa: “If, a lowly, abject woman, I / can carry within so sublime a flame / why shouldn’t I draw out at least / a little of its style and vein to show the world?”
These lines reminded her to acquire her own “style and vein”. But curiously, it was Gertrude Stein who inspired the second phase of Ferrante’s career. Following the critical success of her first three novels, she felt imprisoned by first-person narratives and was convinced she would never write again. After reading The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas – which allowed Stein to write about her own life through the guise of her lifelong companion – Ferrante was guided towards the use of “the necessary other”. This helped her develop a new fictional voice embodied by Lenu and Lila. Indeed, My Brilliant Friend was initially called The Necessary Friend.
The standout lecture of the book is Histories I, in which Ferrante explains how she sees her writing as a kind of “deforming” of existing literary forms. “Overload the genres with conventional expectations? Yes, but in order to disappoint them.” Her final lecture celebrates Dante and his “boldest creation: Beatrice”. In his depiction of Beatrice, Ferrante finds “the most intense desire of the writer and storyteller: the yearning to untie yourself from yourself … a flow of language and writing without feeling otherness as a barrier”.
It’s not unusual to hear readers talk of how Ferrante’s novels have somehow got inside their mind. Despite its insights, I’m not sure this tour of Ferrante’s own mind offers the same rewards. The book feels uneven, tantalising in places, opaque in others. Her ideas can be distilled down into: powerful prose emerges from dutiful prose; all writing is built on the shoulders of great literature; the paradox of realism is it requires truthful lies; and it’s a real bitch to get what’s in your head on to the page. Ferrante can’t help but arouse intrigue and admiration, but I was left wanting more – ideally fiction.
• In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing by Elena Ferrante is published by Europa Editions (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
