You know how when you have in your head a few notes of a tune but you don’t know what it is, and if you hum it, it ends up becoming a different song from the one that’s nagging at you? Or when you remember a street corner but you can’t remember where it is? That kind of thing. My mother liked to use the word frantumaglia—bits and pieces of uncertain origin which rattle around in your head, not always comfortably.

I’d had in my mind for years to a sudden selection of fragments, welded into a story that seemed convincing—that escapes me, I can’t give an honest account. I’m afraid that it’s the same thing as with dreams. Even as you’re recounting them, you know that you’re betraying them.

Elena Ferrante