“What a thing! To see with our own eyes into the honest self of another!”
Elizabeth Strout, “Elizabeth Strout on Judith Joy Ross’s ‘breathtaking’ photography,” FT Magazine, March 11, 2022.
A Conversation with Elena Ferrante
The author of the Neapolitan quartet and the Pulitzer prize-winning novelist discuss identity, ambition, truth – and the ‘convulsive’ urge to write.
“Here is what I believe: it is the pressure between the lines of the text, and the pressure rising up from under the text, and the pressure that is running above the text, that gives the writing its meaning, it is the unwritten sitting right next to the written, which makes something go beyond the explanation of the team of experts. And this is what happens when you go outside the margins (if I understand you correctly) and it is this which is mysterious, that we aim for.”
“No matter how love for others and language as an act of love try continuously, insistently, desperately to get outside the margins of the suffocating first-person singular, we remain bodies organically enclosed in our isolation. Once I recognised this, I was convinced that the other can be truthfully described only through an “I” that is colliding and in the collision unravels.”
Elena Ferrante and Elizabeth Strout, “‘I felt different as a child. I was nearly mute’: Elena Ferrante in conversation with Elizabeth Strout,” The Guardian, March 5, 2022.Joining the American Academy of Arts and Letters
I am honored to have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Congratulations to the other new and honorary members!
The induction ceremony will be held on May 18, 2022.
The New York Review: Writing the Other America
“[A] whole suppressed world of the spirit seems to be speaking in and through Strout’s characters, a spirit urging the slaves of conventional reality to awaken to their need of liberation. For all the depths of anger and despair they uncover, and the bitterness they attest to, Strout’s works insist on the superabundance of life, the unrealized bliss always immanent in it.”
Pankaj Mishra, “Writing the Other America,” The New York Review, November 4, 2021.LitHub: Jane Ciabattari Talks to the Author of Oh William!
“Reading Oh William! is a joy, a settling back into a beloved connection, hearing how her life has gone, what she’s up to now. But before we move on to Lucy, our conversation begins with the question of what’s going on now with her author.”
Jane Ciabattari, “Elizabeth Strout on Inhabiting Her Characters and Writing Directly,” LitHub, November 2, 2021.