When and how did the idea of Ferenike take shape, and what needs or desires were fulfilled once it was published?
I have been thinking about this story for many years. For me, it is a kind of existential matrix. Parts of it lie behind all my novels. I have always been writing about it, in many different ways, so it would be impossible to speak of fulfillment or a final point—only of a version, the one that belongs to the present moment.
Ferenike is a confessional story. You have said that all the events actually happened, yet you placed them within a narrative. How did you decide what remains real and what becomes fiction? Was there such a choice?
Everything is real. And yet it is fiction through style, narrative construction, and the kind of meaning it produces. I did not eliminate any of the events, because all of them were lived, and over time they acquired significance. More than that, none of these events remained frozen at the moment when they occurred, like a scented fact locked inside a memory box. Each one continued to evolve along with me.
I can speak, for instance, about a small object—a bottle of sour cherry liqueur. It begins to enter my dreams, into the realm of endless guilt, gradually transforming into The Cherry Orchard. From there to Chekhovian atmosphere is only one step: the right emotional setting for the same bottle, now surviving into the present as a relic of a blurred childhood. I even took a photograph of that bottle. It belongs to my continuous present. These kinds of temporal incursions dissolve the memoiristic pattern.
The figure of the father hovers over the entire novel, even though he is not always in the foreground. What were you truly trying to explore through this paternal relationship?
I was not interested in the father–daughter relationship itself, which I barely had time to experience. I was not investigating roots or similar themes long since exhausted. What interested me was the way my paternal inheritances were transformed.
The murder I almost witnessed initially seemed like a purely personal tragedy. But over the years I discovered its deeper causes, directly connected to the Vietnam War, and later to Ceaușescu’s exhibitionism—his absurd elevation as a Western hero—which led to Nixon’s visit to Romania and the granting of the Most Favored Nation clause. All these events, in exactly this order, lead toward our present day and toward other wars. In the opposite direction, toward my origins, they move into a brief time span, when my father no longer mattered as a father but as a character.
In Ferenike, what matters is that his short life hurled a question toward me—one I wanted to ignore, yet which determined my ontological direction and ultimately forced me to return there, not as someone recounting memories, but as a novelistic character. In short, I took part in a history that gives meaning to my present.
This discovery compelled me to reconstruct narratively not so much my relationship with my father, but the historical sequence to which I belong. I am the main character of Ferenike. I take part in the action more than in the act of narration. I would never write a novel of recollections or a story seen simplistically through a child’s eyes. I do not believe in that epic scheme. What attracts me instead is a narrative in which remembrance gradually transforms into present action.
I love the story with a peripatetic character, for whom the boundaries between present and past no longer matter. It may sound paradoxical, but the episodes insisting on lucidity—even a child’s lucidity—were meant to establish a necessary distance between narrator and character. Thus, the corpse I saw at the age of eleven, crudely stitched with coarse thread, generated a certain kind of vision; it strengthened my character and my resistance to all forms of aggression.
You once said it is impossible for you “to live inwardly,” that your entire life is on display. How does this transparency coexist with the need for emotional protection when writing autobiographically?
I do not believe I need protection. Living without precautions—both in daily life and in writing—belongs to that much-praised authenticity of being human. After Ferenike was published, some of the novel’s characters came to the first book launches, participating in my story in their own way.
When you lie, when you falsify essential truths, then you need protection. Fiction is not a lie. It does not falsify life; it merely dictates the tone of a truth that is collectively awaited. My life begins with death and extreme violence. I could have become a timid, crushed adult. But that did not happen. From the butchered corpse remained the mirabelle plums and their scent, which invades everything I have written—the July night, the force of a certain time, if you will.
You set the novel aside for almost a year after finishing it. Why? What does distance change in the way a writer looks at their own past?
I usually proceed this way. If, after some time, I no longer like what I have written, I do not publish it. It is a matter of emotional quality. Sometimes I am swept away by the story and give too much importance to action. In literature, however, the balance between emotion and narrative construction is fragile. You only perceive its strength by taking distance.
In this case, it was also an experiment in confession. After writing Ferenike, I wanted to resume the narrative exercise in another period of Mițulică’s life. I felt driven to return to her interwar adolescence, which led me to write Carol’s confession in Zavaidoc in the Year of Love. Even then, the character continued to obsess me, and I carried on the confessional act from the perspective of a Stalinist-era adolescent in my next novel, Sălbatica. These three novels are connected in a way. While I was writing the latter two, Ferenike remained unpublished for a year. That is the story of the resting year.
How and when do you write? Do you have a ritual?
Like any game, everything is dictated by pleasure. I write whenever it comes to me, anywhere—especially in crowded places: markets, airports, amid the constant wail of ambulances.
In Ferenike, dream, memory, introspection, and imagination function almost on the same level. How do you preserve structural clarity in such a personal story?
That is the essence of the epic game. Thank you for noticing. For me, literature is construction above all, and in any epic play the resolution of conflict is what matters. The rest follows naturally.
You write about childhood, but not with typical nostalgia—rather with lucidity. What place does childhood still have in contemporary Romanian literature? Is it an exhausted theme, or just beginning?
I do not think we have a true literature of childhood—that is, a narrative fixed in avant-garde terms—but rather many versions of Creangă’s Memories of My Boyhood. The awaited story should begin with the major question of the current generation, one raised with a phone in hand, yet more concerned with philosophy than previous generations.
You often mention the “inner voice” that writes—a discourse without an audience. What does literature written without fear of judgment look like to you?
My inner tone and rhythm are not very different from those I display publicly. I write and speak in roughly the same register, although social rhythm sometimes differs. The fact that authority—parental, scholastic, social—played little role in my upbringing determined a certain ease in confession, a kind of sincerity. Education usually restrains this (which is often beneficial), but I cultivated that sincerity ostentatiously from an early age, as often happens with people raised by grandparents, with orphans, with those who grow up without a constantly manifested authority.
You have a remarkable ability to access affective memory. How do you work with memories? Are they a clear personal archive, or do you allow them to transform through fiction?
I am flattered, and I would say that transformations occur before writing begins. In the human mind, everything is in flux, often in anamorphosis. This is the trajectory of thought: seemingly chaotic, globally ordered. I have always been curious about the overall image. I love synthesis. I like completed work and I adore resolution. This is where my preference for construction comes from. All of this stems from my native epic disposition. Whatever I might have done in life would have been narrative.
Ferenike—the woman who disguised herself as a man in order to take part in forbidden games—is a name charged with symbolism. You identified with her since adolescence. What does Ferenike mean to you today, as an archetype?
At the beginning, it was a symbol tied to social limitations. Over time, however, it became one of my foundational archetypes. I was no longer interested in the story, but in the general symbolism of triumph, since Ferenike means bearer of victory. I immersed myself so deeply in this ferenikism that the image of the character contaminated me. I assimilated her into my personal chaos, turning her into a recurring presence in my dreams.
I began to dream her before reading her story. The pattern already existed when I encountered the character; she fit it perfectly. She became not so much an image as my own death—the only possible victory in a transient world.
