Elena Ferrante's La Frantumaglia and wounds

I'm a big Elena Ferrante fan. In particular, I like two of her earlier novels -- The Days of Abandonment and The Lost Daughter.

But the words of Ferrante that have captivated me the most aren’t, in fact, in her novels. It’s something she wrote about writing in the book La Frantumaglia, a collection of interviews and manuscript drafts curated by Ferrante’s publishers. There, the reclusive Italian author says what distinguishes The Days of Abandonment from other books she’s begun writing but abandoned is that it “put fingers in particular wounds of mine that were still infected.”

Wounds of mine that were still infected. I underlined the sentence, then bracketed the paragraph. In my journal, I found myself returning to those words, in the original Italian: ferite (wounds) ancora (still) infette (infected).

How does one write about the ferite ancora infette? How does one locate them?

You can read more about this at Asymptote Journal's Blog where my essay on Frantumaglia was published recently. Go here.