I found the piece below this morning while reading my newspaper, the guardian. An extraordinary interview with Elena Ferrante. It explores her books, characters, language and her way of working. The piece below is only one of the so many questions she got to answer and I particularly felt attracted by her answer as it answers questions I have myself, about lives lived afar form the places we where born. It connects with raising your children outside their country of birth, far away form the garden where they spoke their first words, pointed proudly towards themselves.
The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante is published by Europa.
To what extent can a person reinvent herself far from her origins? Esty Brezner, bookseller, IsraelI would begin by emphasising that leaving is not betraying one’s origins. Rather, we have to leave in order to assign origins and establish them as the foundation of our growth. Wandering, we transform our bodies into crowded warehouses. New materials weigh on the original ones, modifying them by merging with them, blending with them. We ourselves seesaw between various ways of being, sometimes enriching our identity, sometimes impoverishing it by subtraction. But our birthplace endures. It’s the ground upon which our primary experiences stand, where we first exercise our gaze, first imagine, first express ourselves. And the more solid we find that ground to be, the more varied is our experience of elsewhere. Naples would not be my single true city if I hadn’t soon discovered, in other places, in contact with other people, that there and only there did I begin timidly to say to myself “I”.
https://www.europaeditions.co.uk/review/3252