In the Margins: on the Pleasures of Reading and Writing

 By Elena Ferrante

Translated by Ann Goldstein

Europa Editions 2022

111 pages     Essays

We do not know exactly who Elena Ferrante is, except that she is a gifted writer. In 2020, she wrote some lectures that were intended to be read by actors, not the author herself. She remains anonymous, but we learn a little more about her writing style in these four essays, aptly named In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing. 

She discusses the difficulties of growing up female and trying to compete in the male-dominated literary scene. She says, “I had to write like a man, staying strictly within the male tradition: although a woman, I couldn’t write like a woman except by violating what I was diligently trying to learn from the male tradition.” It wasn’t until she read Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas that she affirmed her voice as a female writer.

This very much reminded me of a paper I wrote for a philosophy class my senior year of university, probably 1965. The professor gave me an A+ on the paper and wrote, “Now you are starting to think like a man” on the paper’s margins. While I appreciated the A+, I was deeply offended by the comment. Because Ferrante must be about my age, I was able to understand her perturbation about trying to find her own voice as a writer.

The essays are a bit meandering. However, I really appreciated the essay that she calls, Histories I. This is where the reader comes to understand Ferrante’s skill as a writer telling the story of women’s lives and the challenges female authors face. She closes this essay by saying, “ I believe that the pure and simple joining of the female ‘I’ to History changes history.” She is proud that no one can now say of her writing that finally she is thinking like a man.

The reviewer in The Guardian writes, “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.” 

Although I read My Brilliant Friend and watched the first season on HBO, that is the only Ferrante that I have read or watched. I may go back now and read her latest novel, The Lying Life of Adults, which has lingered on my Kindle for a couple of years.

In the Margins is an excellent footnote on the art of writing, and the skill that a woman writer must develop. Besides that, focus on the incredible book cover. The cover highlights and explains the book's contents explicitly.