From the Paris Review’s conversation with Elena Ferrante, the first in-person interview the writer has granted.
At fifteen I began to write stories about brave girls who were in serious trouble. But the idea remained — indeed, it grew stronger — that the greatest narrators were men and that one had to learn to narrate like them. I devoured books at that age, and there’s no getting around it, my models were masculine. So even when I wrote stories about girls, I wanted to give the heroine a wealth of experiences, a freedom, a determination that I tried to imitate from the great novels written by men.