Matthew Frye-Castillo

I worked for a long time, plunging headlong into the material that I wanted to narrate, to distill from my own experience and that of others whatever “public” material could be distilled, whatever appeared to me extractable from voices, facts, persons near and far, to construct characters and a narrative organism of some public coherence. Now that that organism has, for good or ill, its own self-sufficient equilibrium, why should I entrust myself to the media? Why continue to mix its breath with mine? I have a well-founded fear that the media, which, because of its current nature, that is, lacking a true vocation for “public interest,” would be inclined, carelessly, to restore a private quality to an object that originated precisely to give a less circumscribed meaning to individual experience.

-Elena Ferrante, ‘Writing Secretly: Letter to Goffredo Fofi”