Elena Ferrante

A period of unhappiness began. I got fat, and under the skin of my chest two hard shoots sprouted, hair flourished in my armpits and my pubis, I became sad and at the same time anxious. In school I worked harder than I ever had, yet the mathematics problems almost never gave the result expected by the textbook, the Latin sentences seemed to make no sense. As soon as I could I locked myself in the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror, naked. I no longer knew who I was. I began to suspect that I would keep changing, until from me my mother would emerge, lame, with a crossed eye, and no one would love me anymore. I cried often, without warning. My chest, meanwhile, became large and soft. I felt at the mercy of obscure forces acting inside my body, I was always agitated.

We told each other everything, even the little things, and were happy.

to call him an animal was to insult animals

and that in the end, I thought, reduced his courtesy to a sort of hiding place from which to jump out unexpectedly

This entire period had a similar character. I soon had to admit that what I did by myself couldn’t excite me, only what Lila touched became important.

I had never gone into my old school and I felt a strong emotion, I recognized the smell, which brought with it a sensation of comfort, a sense of myself that I no longer had.

In those middle school years many things changed right before our eyes, but day by day, so that they didn’t seem to be real changes.

She was trying to understand, we were both trying to understand, and understanding was something that we loved to do.

even though she had stopped going to school, but—further—she left no trace of effort, you weren’t aware of the artifice of the written word. I read and I saw her, I heard her. The voice set in the writing overwhelmed me, enthralled me even more than when we talked face to face: it was completely cleansed of the dross of speech, of the confusion of the oral; it had the vivid orderliness that I imagined would belong to conversation if one were so fortunate as to be born from the head of Zeus and not from the Grecos, the Cerullos.

It took a while to recopy. When she gave me back the notebook, she said, “You’re very clever, of course they always give you ten.”

I felt that there was no irony, it was a real compliment. Then she added with sudden harshness:

“I don’t want to read anything else that you write.”

“Why?”

She thought about it.

“Because it hurts me,” and she struck her forehead with her hand and burst out laughing.