The Neapolitan Novels, four pensive yet pacy volumes that total almost 1700 pages, follow the fraught and defining friendship between Elena and Lila as they embody that complexity. Beginning shortly after World War II and spanning about 60 years, the books chronicle their diverging yet tangled lives as they face the poverty and violence of their neighbourhood, give in to erotic longing, and discover dark truths about the men who run their country. At every phase, Elena's identity is shaped and warped by her idea of Lila. Ferrante's depictions of the two can be liberating but uncomfortable. My Brilliant Friend. "Most of all I love readers who don't want to be consoled. I write in order to recount an experience," she replies, describing her ideal reader as "one who is passionate about the tangle of existence and detests simplifications". Of the reader's responsibility, she writes: "One must establish an intense and enduring relationship with a book. The best reader is one who considers the book a living organism. The best reader is one who performs the score of the text not only abandoning themselves to it but also relishing the responsibility and the right to explore it with all of their sensitivity and all of their imagination." The Neapolitan Novels contain a great central struggle, one that echoes through the fiction into the author's identity. In the opening pages of My Brilliant Friend, Lila disappears, having removed every trace of her existence. In response, Elena constructs a version of Lila, one that her friend cannot destroy: "Hers is a final push to take the lead in a complex relationship that for all her life has both subordinated and strengthened her."

One of the most thrilling aspects of the novels is their sense of instability, of almost understanding the characters, especially Lila, who recreates her identity in myriad ways, then negates herself. 'The Story of a New Name' by Elena Ferrante, the second book in her Neapolitan series. "I have had friends and acquaintances who are not too dissimilar, unruly and yet at the same time overwhelmed by the struggle of living in opposition to the world. Lila owes much to them," Ferrante says. "They were uncomfortable women, uncomfortable most of all with themselves. Living in opposition is not easy. One gives in and compromises are necessary, which, however, are humiliating, that cause shame and result in excessive insurgencies in order to redeem themselves. Bodies are tested, and sometimes they give in." Book 3: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante.

If there's still any doubt about whether Ferrante's pseudonymity is an elaborate publicity stunt, consider its history. When Edizioni E/O scheduled for publication Ferrante's first novel, Troubling Love, she clarified her position in a 1991 letter to her editor: "I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors ... I'll spare you even my presence." Nearly 25 years later, one of the first things readers wonder when faced with Ferrante's books is: Who is she? A better question might be: Does it matter? Unlike Lila, she has not disappeared. We know that she's from Naples, that she is a woman, possibly a mother. Her novels all appear under the same name, providing a cohesive body of work. Would they change if we knew her hairstyle or family history? The Story of the Lost Child. I don't protect my private life. I protect my writing, I protect it from the same urgency to publish. Elena Ferrante "If the book doesn't have within it the answers to all of the reader's questions, it means that the book has either turned out badly or that the reader is posing questions that are beyond the book, as if they were saying (and I see this happening more and more): I haven't read your novel, but all the same I'd like to ask you. Authors – all of them – are considered dead, swept away just like Homer, and all together ready to rise up again each time a reader reads their pages and interrogates them.

"We tend to identify the author with the person who has written the book. It's not like this," she writes. "The author is the book, is the writing, coinciding with the whole range of techniques, expressive strategies, and linguistic material with which the author addresses the reader. "The person who has created the writing is, beyond the writing, so redundant, so fragmented, that often she cannot account for the book other than in an approximate, changeable way, and is not even sure that she will know how to write another. When readers today think they are meeting the author, in reality they're meeting a man or a woman, rich or poor in humanity, but who has already left the role of author. The author – and his capacity to develop the quality of the linguistic material to which he resorts – is present only in the works." Ferrante, however, understands the reader's temptation to verify the "truth" of a novel through the writer's biography. "The entire history of literature has at its core the problem of truth. And so it's fairly normal that autobiography is viewed as though it has the greatest guarantee of truth ... The truth of fiction, in short, is directly proportional to the quality of the writing and it has nothing to do with autobiographical truth, which, at the very most, has the role of raw material, like marble for a statue." Ferrante rejects the idea that she uses a pseudonym to shield herself. "If I decide to publish, I want the book to have within it all that is necessary to earn readers. But writing – the pure and simple joy of writing – doesn't need a public, it's my own space of freedom ... I don't protect my private life. I protect my writing, I protect it from the same urgency to publish."

When questioned whether she worries that someone might document her life the way that Elena does to Lila, she replies in a surprising way: "I love figures like Lila: they come into the world precisely to show us that stability, security, certainty, one's own happiness are imagined dreams, while true life engulfs us." For the Neapolitan Novels, though, Ferrante gave her narrator the same first name as her pseudonym. "That name helped me believe fully in the story that I was writing, especially its contradictions and inconsistencies. I wanted to be Elena, the author, and Elena, the narrator. In this way I tried to keep all of my experience on the page and I confronted the most risky point, that is when the most intimate, most personal part of the story becomes a springboard for the imagination and at every step can be overwhelmed by invention and lose every truth." She returns often to the idea of truth in fiction. "Literary truth is much harder than that of the historian. It's not based on fact-finding, on the research of documents, but on the audacity, recklessness, and effrontery of the person doing the telling ... Fiction must express truths that are otherwise unspeakable. And it needs a tone that testifies with every word that invention is entirely unrelated to falsehood." Ferrante's language is considered. About the way she reconciles the finished books with what she had imagined, she replies, "I don't imagine books, I write them. Or rather, imagination and writing for me are not separate moments. Writing is imagination. When the job is done, the collision is not between the project and its realisation, but between what I imagined I would write and what I actually wrote. When it seems to me that there is no connection, I put the book aside."

A description of her typical writing day proves Ferrante's dedication to the process. "The worst days are those when the more you write, the more every line seems false. The best are those when it seems that every page comes out true and is so pleasurable to write that you don't even realise that you've been working for hours and hours. The latter doesn't happen very often for me. But the years in which I wrote My Brilliant Friend (and this for me is the title of the entire four-book story) were particularly happy." And now that she has completed some of the most talked-about novels in recent years? "I can't live without writing, and so I am writing. But nothing publishable." My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay and The Story of the Lost Child are published by Text. Jennifer Levasseur writes about books at sacredtrespasses.com. Her Conversations with James Salter is published by the University Press of Mississippi.