Elena Ferrante: ‘The experience of writing a diary transformed me into a fiction writer’

I thought that when one writes, it makes no sense to be contained, to censor oneself

I kept a diary for several years as a girl. I was a timid adolescent; all I said was yes, and mostly I was silent. In my diary, on the other hand, I let go: I recounted in detail what happened to me every day, very secret events, bold thoughts. So I was really worried about it: I was afraid that my family, especially my mother, would find it and read it. Thus I was always inventing safe hiding places that soon seemed to me unsafe.

Why was I worried? Because if, in everyday life, I was so embarrassed, so cautious, that I scarcely breathed, the diary produced in me a craving for truth. I thought that when one writes, it makes no sense to be contained, to censor oneself, and as a result I wrote mostly – maybe only – about what I would have preferred to be silent about, resorting among other things to a vocabulary that I would never have dared to use in speaking.

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from The Guardian http://ift.tt/2GKK3bx
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