When Natalia Ginzburg was growing up in Turin in the 1920s, she learned that in order to be listened to she had to speak quickly. At the table, her brothers would tell Natalia, the youngest of five by seven years, to be quiet whenever she attempted to talk. She realised she was more likely to be heard if she spoke “in a headlong fashion with the smallest possible number of words”.
The experience informed her work: when she began to write stories as a schoolgirl she finished them with similar haste, she reveals in her 1949 essay “Il mio mestiere” (“My Vocation”). “Perhaps this seems a rather stupid explanation; nevertheless that is how it was.”
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