On the cover of Elena Ferrantes highly anticipated upcoming book Frantumaglia , which translates to self-portrait, a young woman crouches beneath the window of a dilapidated house, her body cloaked in shards of wallpaper, peeled off into fragments, as flimsy as crepe paper.

Its rare to encounter a wall, often understood as a rigid barrier more than a physical thing, in such a fragile state so easily broken, worn like a cloth.

The image is the work of Francesca Woodman , an iconic photographer who took her own life at 22 years old, when she jumped out of a window. Its Woodman pictured in the photo, her figure blurred like a signature thats not-so accidentally been smudged. The piece is a self-portrait, though Woodmans image is purposefully and exquisitely obscured, her boundaries dissolved as if her body were spun of cotton candy instead of flesh.

Woodmans image is a perfect foil to Ferrantes words, as both women thoughtfully navigate the space between absence and presence, fame and anonymity.

Ferrante, for example, published her wildly beloved four-part Neapolitan Series under a pseudonym , preferring to keep her identity anonymous. In a variety of interviews , Ferrante expressed her belief that the self-promotion required by artists and creators today ends up diminishing the power of their work. Stemming from a desire for intangibility , Ferrante opted to evaporate behind her richly textured characters and stories, which took on lives of their own.

Of course, her clearly stated desire was denied recently when Italian journalist Claudio Gatti outed Ferrante in the New York Review of Books, claiming that, because the author admitted to lying on occasion, she relinquished her right to disappear behind her books and let them live and grow while their author remained unknown.

With his unwarranted and unwanted investigation, Gatti stripped Ferrante of her ability to hide in plain sight, as if the wall that once protected her was unceremoniously ripped down, haphazardly used to cover her exposed parts.