Author's name: Elena Ferrante

Frantomalia is a word that encompasses many feelings, including exhaustion to the point of drowning in a jumble of wreckage. It is this state that the author seeks to capture the fragmented memories of life and transform them into a novel.
This book provides us with a perfect example of the sheer passion for writing, as it takes us into Elena Ferrante's laboratory, to take a look at the drawers from which emerged her first three novels and the amazing My Friend Quartet (which recently topped the list of the best novels of the twenty-first century according to the New York Times).
The writer answers many questions she receives from her readers. She talks about why an author should step back and let the text find its own path. She talks about the thoughts and fears that haunt her when her novels are turned into films. She talks about the joys, troubles, and worries that come to mind when someone tells a story and then discovers its shortcomings.
She discusses the writer's need to acquire a narrative identity, and stealth writing as a necessity rather than a myth. She discusses her relationship with motherhood, feminism, psychoanalysis, the cities in which she lived, and childhood as a repository of thousands of inspirations and fantasies. The result is this book, brimming with characters and events that read like a novel—a self-portrait saturated with the narrative vitality of an unparalleled writer.