Yet over the course of a two-month correspondence, which was mediated by her editor, my editor and her translator, Ann Goldstein, the distance between us seemed only to expand. She answered questions I had not asked and ignored the ones I had. She got irritated, apologized, misinterpreted my phrasing — willfully, I suspected. When I asked her what living authors she enjoyed reading, she wrote: “I would have to give a very complex answer, talking about various stages of my life. I’ll answer you some other time.” When, I wondered, imagining that one day I might open my door and find a children’s wagon full of moldy novels, with no address, no note, no glimpse of a telltale figure hurrying away.

An interview is a collaboration, too, though like all collaborations with Ferrante, an imbalanced one. Often she answered my questions in the same oblique style as her narrator. “Maybe in more than a few cases I was overly frank,” she wrote when I asked her what instructions she gave Costanzo. “Maybe I intervened, with some presumptuousness, in irrelevant details.” She told me she thinks collaborations between women are more difficult than collaborations between a woman and a man, whose authority a woman can either submit to or pretend to recognize while pursuing her own agenda. “Certainly it’s more complicated to recognize the authority of another woman; tradition in that case is more fragile,” she wrote. “It works if, in a relationship between the person in charge and the subordinate, the first wants the other to grow and free herself from her subordinate status, and the second gains her autonomy without feeling obliged to diminish the other.”

As the subordinate, I could only strategize how to ask questions that would compel her to write useful answers for me. My initial plan was to present myself as a new mother who found in Ferrante’s fiction the emotional tumult of motherhood as I am living it. In the note that preceded my questions, I told her that I have found myself returning to the third book in the Neapolitan series, “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay,” many times since having my two children. No other novel I have read captures the vicissitudes of motherhood with such precision: the power and vulnerability of caring for others, the intimacy and distance between mother and child. When I became a mother, it was painful to realize that my mother had a separate life, a different self, before she became my mother; painful too to think that my children might not realize this about me until it was too late.

She did not acknowledge my note.

I tried again with a question, only this time my tone was less sentimental, more acerbic. I observed that contemporary writing on motherhood has an irritating tendency to treat children as psychological impediments to creativity — as if a child must steal not only time and energy from his mother but also language and thought. But her novels are different: They entertain the possibility that motherhood might be an experience conducive to creativity, even when it is tiring or onerous. For a short time, Lila transforms motherhood into an act of grace, and though she finds her children burdensome, Lenù’s greatest professional success comes after she becomes a mother. What did she take to be the relationship between time spent taking care of words and time spent taking care of children?

She was more receptive, if a little scolding. “I very much like the way you’ve formulated the question,” she wrote. “But I want to say that it’s not right to speak of motherhood in general. The troubles of the poor mother are different from those of the well-off mother, who can pay another woman to help her. But whether the mother is rich or poor, if there is a real, powerful creative urge, the care of children, however much it absorbs and at times even consumes us, doesn’t win out over the care of words: One finds the time for both. Or at least that was my experience: I found the time when I was a terrified mother, without any support, and also when I was a well-off mother. So I will take the liberty of asserting that women should in no case give up the power of reproduction in the name of production.”

There was something different about the style of this answer. The “I” she wielded seemed more present, the defenseless voice of the writer behind the author. I asked her to say more about being a terrified mother. What, I asked, was the nature of that terror for her?

She retreated, adopting the impersonal tone of the commentator once again. “I’m afraid of mothers who sacrifice their lives to their children,” she wrote. “I’m afraid of mothers who surrender themselves completely and live for their children, who hide the difficulties of motherhood and pretend even to themselves to be perfect mothers.” It is tempting to rewrite these statements to reclaim the immediacy of her “I”: “I was afraid of sacrificing my life to my children; I was afraid of surrendering myself completely.” But nothing authorizes it. It may not even be the right interpretation; she may really be talking about her fear of other mothers. Why do I want to make it about her? To do so would be to traffic in fiction. But the traffic in fiction is pleasurable. It prompts me to study her language carefully, to appreciate anew the words she has chosen, the phrases she repeats, how easily she moves between sentences. It prompts me to rewrite her words to project fears I may or may not have onto the figure of the author — the character she and I are sustaining. It lets me speak without speaking for myself.