Then I was thinking of My Brilliant Friend, of Lila and Lenù exchanging their dolls, of those dolls falling through the darkness beyond the cellar grate. You get them sometimes and they are unmistakable a charge jumps from person to person. Little girls sitting in fifties poses, Barbies buried amid pails and shovels, mother Barbies, big and bright-coloured, like plastic totems, little girls walking along or playing pianos made of sand.’ Never tell a writer this!) ‘It all started with photos,’ Miriam continues, ‘with black-and-white photos that were taken at the seaside. A shy, bold reader, Miriam, writes to say ‘there is an invisible thread that connects us through a shared narrative project that you address with words and I with images.’ (Oh NO, I thought. ‘What does Elena Ferrante think about social questions like euthanasia?’ another inquires, breezily. ‘Is the mysterious Elena possibly someone who knows me?’ one woman writes in to ask. Read it for the conversation from 2006 with the listeners of the radio programme Fahrenheit, in which devotees and doppelgängers emerge from white static to surround her anonymity. Read it instead of the real estate records. I became that thing she cautions us not to be: a fan. I started as a normal reader and ended up willing to give her a kidney.

I began Frantumaglia thinking that I knew what it would be – an exploration of craft, a ‘writer’s journey’ – and found it one of the most unstinting books I have ever read, full of polish and friction and human electricity, deeper and more revealing than anything the vultures could peck out of her. All that is necessary to know about Ferrante, beyond the novels, is contained in a book called Frantumaglia (2016), a collection of essays, interviews and passionate long letters that were never sent. The cry BUT WE DON’T KNOW WHO ELENA FERRANTE IS, EXCEPT FOR THOSE OF US WHO LOOKED UP HER REAL ESTATE RECORDS! is met from me only with the words: ‘Thank God.’ I am tired of knowing who people are. Sometimes a writer gets married three times, or is a sex freak, or stabs people at parties.

D o you understand what a pleasure it is not to have to begin with this little biographical section? Sometimes a writer goes to school somewhere, and you have to know which years.

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