SOURCE: Boyers, Peggy. “An Introduction: Natalia Ginzburg in Her Essays.” Salmagundi, no. 96 (fall 1992): 54-84.

In the following essay, Boyers surveys the diverse subject matter of Ginzburg's essays and praises her nonfiction work as concise, perceptive, and lucid.

In an autobiographical essay on “Childhood” Natalia Ginzburg wrote of her family the following: “We were ‘nothing’, my brothers had told me; we were ‘mixed’, that is, half Jewish and half Catholic, but in fact neither one thing nor the other: nothing. This being ‘nothing’ in religion seemed to me to pervade our whole way of life: we were neither really rich, nor really poor: excluded from both these worlds, relegated to some neutral, amorphous, indefinable, nameless area.” In her childhood Ginzburg experienced “this being ‘nothing’” as a source of anguish, but in her adult years she valued it more than anything else. The inability to classify herself, her family, or...