After finishing I had to reconfigure myself to reality again. Convince myself that I was not living in the novel’s world. After three-hundred or so pages of intense first-person description of this small, hopelessly intertwined community, that was no mean feat.

Detachment (then reattachment) from the real world is a required state-of-being for a reader. This becomes more true when one is also a writer. To write one must be able to switch between being a solitary, isolated figure, battling one’s own thoughts and writing the best down, and being a public figure, throwing words out into the crowd, defending them, knowing and fearing one will be judged personally for them. It’s a troubling, but inevitable, state of affairs.

For an MFA student, it’s consoling to think that this struggle between the public and private self is one all writers must go through. Or at least, it was a consoling thought until I remembered that it’s only true for most writers. And Ferrante isn’t one of them.

There are a number of writers who self-eradicate. Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy and J.D. Salinger are a few, but they seem like vicious, fame-hungry dogs compared to Ferrante. At least we know their names are real.

Her ability to live completely in the shadows and not be tempted to even do a telephone interview is admirable. It is also, I am sorry to admit, infuriating.

I say this because during my MFA program my coursemates and I have been told weekly that the odds are against us. Indeed, even in my undergraduate course, my class were told that out of the twenty of us, half a person, statistically, would go on to publish. (Which half of which person was the question that sprang to mind before the reality of the words set in.)

If we were one of the lucky ones (or halves), we were told that it would be down to a great deal of self-promotion and hard work. In short, talent wasn’t going to be enough to ensure we were rewarded. That’s fine, I thought. It’s comforting to know that you need talent and tenacity to succeed. I’ll just try extra hard to promote my work and success is sure to come.

But then along came Ferrante. Not only has she been the lucky half-person in the class, but that lucky half won the lottery and struck oil. She undoubtedly has the talent, but she just gets to sit back and see her book sell itself. Her own privacy seems to be the fuel for her unstoppable popularity machine. That doesn’t seem fair, does it?

Obviously, it’s jealousy I feel, because she gets to choose how to live. But there is another more troubling reason that I resent Ferrante’s ability to relax into a life lived on her terms.

If I didn’t resent it, and I didn’t want anonymity and peace and to think of myself as entirely the writer I am, then what would I want? Fame and fortune? Honors and awards? As nice as those things would be, I don’t think they are the kind of things a (good) writer’s career is built on.

I’m forced to admit: what I want is to be successful enough that I can spurn the very fame I’m telling myself I don’t want. Oh dear.

I hope I speak for all of us in the “emerging writers” category, those who have no more of an idea of their future career trajectory than they do quantum physics, when I say all of this. For us, the very idea of having someone read our work is a blessing. To be asked to read it to others, therefore, is a privilege that dreams are currently made of. To be so in demand that one can turn these things, or one must turn them down to preserve the regularity of life is a pipe-dream that one can only entertain for a few minutes a day if one wants to stay sane.

Ferrante, then, should not be the person we take career advice from, unless we wish to drive ourselves mad.

Now as the guilt sets in, it’s reached the point where I should come clean: I’m not a petulant child, jealous of the success I don’t yet have and ungrateful for the peaceful life I currently live. This isn’t about jealousy, or ingratitude, or even my great respect for a writer of such intricate and enthralling stories. It’s about hope. The worst and best thing Ferrante did was give me hope.

At some point, a teacher told her that only half of a person in her class might publish and she would have to sell her soul to do so. And she looked them square in the face and said no (or maybe no, in an Italian accent) and told them she could publish, and she could do it on her own terms. So, there’s hope for me yet. In spite of everything I know about the publishing world. If she did it, and did it her own way, then why can’t I? Damn her, damn her, why can’t I?

Josh King is a second-year MFA student at Adelphi University in New York, and moved from the UK in 2014. He divides his time between writing fiction and sampling the New York literary scene. He also writes a column for London’s Litro Magazine.

The post Envy, Ingratitude and Hope: Why Elena Ferrante is a Bad Role Model appeared first on Newfound.

In a rare interview with the author in the spring 2015 issue of the Paris Review, Ferrante declares herself “still very much interested in testifying against the self-promotion obsessively imposed by the media. This demand for self-promotion diminishes the actual work of art, whatever that art may be, and it has become universal.” She then goes on to explain the creative space that opened up for her when she realized that her anonymity would be protected by her publishers. “[It] made me see something new about writing,” she says. “I felt as though I had released the words from myself.”

The interview gave me pause, and, as someone who’s ambivalent  toward social media, I found Ferrante’s views refreshing. It’s commonly accepted that everyone who’s anyone needs to have an online presence. But here’s a woman who doesn’t care what everyone else is doing; she’s not convinced. Ferrante does, of course, have an online presence—a website presumably maintained by somebody else (sans author photo), and the countless public-forum conversations among her readers—but Ferrante herself seems to have washed her hands of the whole business, and it has done nothing but improve her writing.

But that doesn’t mean #FerranteFever isn’t real. However much it may seem like a ploy devised by the publisher, Europa Editions, or a grown-up version of literary Belieberism, what it describes is in fact a kind of enchantment, a gauzy delirium that descends while reading Ferrante’s novels. I know because I’ve caught it.

I contracted it at work, where I catch most things, colds and enchantments alike. Such are the benefits and hazards of working at a public library. In the stacks one evening, I discovered a slim volume, The Days of Abandonment. I began reading it the following morning, my day off, and—laundry be damned!—I couldn’t stop. Within a few weeks, I’d consumed everything Ferrante has written, including her densely populated Neapolitan novels. Like the rest of her devoted readers, I’m now counting days until September, when the fourth Neapolitan book is scheduled for release.

It’s difficult to say precisely why Ferrante’s novels are so deeply affecting. That Ferrante is a masterful writer is plain—and recognition is due also to the brilliant English translations by Ann Goldstein. But trying to explain why Ferrante’s books are spellbinding would be like trying to explain what is magical about Bach’s Sixth Brandenburg Concerto. There’s something numinous in her apparently straightforward, elegant prose. She’s not a tricky writer, presenting readers with a basket of puzzle pieces to fit together; she doesn’t rely on literary cleverness. There is a kind of purity in her writing, an intensity. Reading Ferrante is like following a crackling fuse with your eyes; each line of text burns across the page.

But it isn’t just the writing that drives Ferrante’s stories, it’s her willingness to examine an individual’s interior life. I read a lot of books, but Ferrante’s stand out to me for their honesty, and it strikes me as an honesty that is hard won. In the Paris Review interview, Ferrante quotes Leda, her protagonist in The Lost Daughter. “ ‘The hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves can’t understand.’ It’s the motto—can I call it that?—at the root of all my books.” Ferrante’s brand of honesty isn’t merely the art-as-mirror acknowledgment that brutality and heartbreak exist in the world, but an investigation into their individual origins and impacts. The Neapolitan novels, for example, are a sweeping examination of a complicated friendship at the center of two women’s lives, which, for better or worse, affects every decision they make.

At a time when much of contemporary American literary fiction seems to be moving away from this kind of deeply personal writing and toward the fantastical and bizarre, Ferrante’s approach to literature is life-affirming. She celebrates what it is to have a human heart, the rawness and apathy and rage, as well as the brief, transcendent moments of happiness.

E. D. Watson is Newfound’s Blog Editor. A writer by day and a library clerk by night, her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Bodega, [PANK], Narrative, and THIS., among other publications. She eats cheddar-and-mayonnaise sandwiches when no one is looking.

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