They have often-but not necessarily-experienced trauma. They are often-but not exclusively-poor, neurodivergent, queer, women, people of color.

They might be described as unreliable, complex, neurotic, frustrating, unlikeable. These characters might seem underdeveloped, cold, aloof, not fully fleshed-out, unable to offer the reader a straightforward account of themselves. A warm, palpable sense of self does not waft off the page to greet you, like a friend or familiar scent. Meeting sufferers of frantumaglia in fiction doesn’t guarantee pleasurable reading. Ferrante writes that this inherited dissociative state directly relates to the ability to speak as oneself: “…the fear that the capacity to express myself would get stuck-as if the organs of speech had been paralyzed-and everything I’d learned to control, from the first year of life until now, would start fluctuating on its own, dripping or hissing out of a body becoming a thing, a leather sack leaking air and liquids.” Haven’t you ever felt like a not-so well-rounded person, felt unreal, insubstantial in comparison to others? I’m not referring to insecurity or imposter syndrome so much as the fraying, febrile experience of dissociation, of feeling like your past and present do not cohere to real personhood.Įlena Ferrante’s term for it is frantumaglia, a word from her mother’s dialect that inscribes the self as a jumble of fragments to experience frantumaglia is to be an “unstable landscape,” racked with contradictory sensations that threaten to tear you apart.

A sinful reading admission: I like characters that are not well-rounded, and protagonists that have an uneasy relationship to being main.

Little leather library books value