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Great stuff here for those interested in the writing process, on how it is sieved from memory’s ambiguous fragments. To read of the many levels on which Ferrante proceeds as a novelist is—for the deep reader or writer—riveting. The autobiography in Chapter 1.16, which describes the childhood she plumbed in order to write her first two novellas�Troubling Love and The Days of Abandonment—is very interesting. Most fascinating to me were the two sections of text, one from each of the first two novellas, inserted here that had been cut from those books. Ferrante's rich comments about why she cut these sections serve as a veritable workshop in creative writing. Let me add, that I've never heard of another writer doing this; that is, displaying rejected text from his or her own novel and explaining its deficiencies. There are also Ferrante's written exchanges with the director Mario Martone who turned her first novella into an Italian-language movie. No, to my knowledge that film was never subtitled or distributed for an English-speaking audience. But coming soon to HBO will be an Italian-made, English-subtitled treatment of Ferrante’s four magnificent Neapolitan Novels. Let me conclude with a few quibbles: I take exception to Chapter 2.8, in which Ferrante answers questions from listeners of the Italian radio program Fahrenheit. Her answers are well worth reading, but the letters from the readers, save one or two, range from dreary to bonkers. Another annoyance comes in the form of incessant questions from interviewers about her decision to remain anonymous and not junket her books. When they outted her a year or so ago, I actually read her real name, but I haven't retained it. Who cares? Only, as she articulately explains, the media, and that's because journalists possess no critical vocabulary for dealing with writing alone. So they must constantly have personalities to fete. It's the author’s face that interests them, biological fodder they can write, but they can’t discuss fiction critically, and even if they could who would read them? Media is celebrity and nothing else, and celebrity, Ferrante argues, has nothing to do with whether or not a book is worthwhile. Yet the topic comes up so often in these pages it grows tedious. Enough. Some of this repetitiveness might have been edited out. If the book can be said to have a weak point, that’s it. But there are scads of goodies here that will delight those who care for and think deeply about literature.