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Frantumaglia is very true to the subtitle given in the Brazilian edition: "the ways of a writer". It is mostly composed of interviews usually sent to Ferrante's editors, from the release of her first novel, L'amore molesto in 1992 till after the publishing of the last book of the Neapolitan tetralogy, Storia della bambina perduta.

As usual in such kind of book, the questions sent to Ferrante do not vary much. I have seen the same in those two books composed of interviews, the first with Elizabeth Bishop; the second with Brazilian author Hilda Hilst. It is as if, and as put by Ferrante herself, what is in store is the media's need for audience and spotlight, regardless of the qualities of books, even creating theses that the author has an obligation to their readers as a public figure, which is constantly contested by her.

Indeed, what should count is the authors' expressions translated into the form of books, and I agree with her that the author is present all the time in the words along the book, in the way it was thought and written, in the story itself. She is a daring person to stand for her word and not play the media's game. I stand by her in her decision to avoid public appearance.

As for the book itself, there are 3 interviews that outstand the most because of her decision on how to answer them. The first is the one that gives the book its title, "La Frantumaglia", in which she ends up writing a long beautiful text in answer to the questions sent by Indice's group of journalists, one that seems more like an article that gives a somehow true face to her interesting female characters, their relations to their mothers and to their Neapolitan past, etc. The second great interview is given to her editors, Sandro Ferri and Sandra Ozzola, and their daughter, Eva. Interesting questions and profound answers. The last great one was given to Nicola Lagioia, also an author, and probably the best interview of the whole book.

(..) I’m drawn, rather, to images of crisis, to seals that are broken. When shapes lose their contours, we see what most terrifies us, as in Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,� Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,� and Clarice Lispector’s extraordinary “Passion According to G.H.� You don’t go beyond that; you have to take a step back and, to survive, reënter some good fiction. I don’t believe, however, that every fiction we orchestrate is good. I cling to those that are painful, those that arise from a profound crisis of all our illusions. I love unreal things when they show signs of firsthand knowledge of the terror, and hence an awareness that they are unreal, that they will not hold up for long against the collisions. Human beings are extremely violent animals, and the violence they are always ready to use in order to impose their own eternal, salvific life vest, while shattering those of others, is frightening.

The question of true writing is another very interesting topic in the main interviews. True writing means what needs to be written, regardless of the beauty in the writing, the projected images, the perfect phrases, etc. It is indeed, the feeling of a "whirlpool of fragment-words" (frantumaglia), something that destabilizes rather than compose or organize. Besides Ferrante's, I can easily recall such kind of writing in Virginia Woolf, Clarice Lispector, Bessie Head (her exceptional A question of power), Vivian Gornick.

For those who appreciate Ferrante's writing, this is a very interesting book to start with. But for those who want to deepen themselves in issues hardly brought up on a daily basis and get to know a mind of its own, who doesn't look for easy answers or easy paths, as I do so much appreciate, this is a must-read!