The person who tried to get me to read it for the first time was my mother. ME: I will say that I’d forgotten that I had lied-which happens when you lie, which is why I try not to lie. We came into it, Stephanie, the way you just described: knowing about Ferrante and knowing that she was a ‘thing’, but not knowing what that thing was, which I think is a very common experience.

I think that you two suspected that Ferrante would be a good subject for it, but Jill and I did not know. SC: You lied and said you hadn’t read them!

Sarah Chihaya (SC): I think you’re revising history a little bit. And we wanted to write together about a novel or series of novels that none of us had read. We wanted to find a way-a sustained and rigorous but also conversational and entertaining way-of getting at those thornier questions about form that we felt like the popular writing around Ferrante simply hadn’t addressed.

This led us to believe that people had not done a good enough job paying attention to what we suspected was most interesting about Ferrante, which was her approach to the novel form. People talked about them as if they were somehow the literary equivalents of soap operas, or a faithful transcription of the author’s life. Merve Emre (ME): I’m grateful for this question, because I think it confirms something that we suspected when the four of us started this co-reading and writing project in 2015, which was that the popularity of Ferrante’s books was a function of things other than the books themselves.

Foreign Policy & International RelationsĬan you introduce Elena Ferrante and lead into My Brilliant Friend?.

Elena ferrante book order