Many readers may have been anxiously awaiting The Lying Life of Adults, ready to devour the 322 pages in search of an answer to the ultimate question: Who is Elena Ferrante? The anonymous author became something of a celebrity with the global success of her first four novels, a series known as the Neapolitan quartet. She writes with the lyrical pen name, Elena Ferrante, a nostalgic sounding pseudonym which evokes the Italian female novelist, Elsa Morante. A Naples native herself, Ferrante has worked with translator Anne Goldstein on all of her books, including the latest: The Lying Life of Adults. 

        Ferrante’s first novel, My Brilliant Friend became available in English translation in 2012 and the series concluded in 2015 with The Story of the Lost Child. In the span of those three years, Ferrante reached the hearts of her readers while they reached for their phones, with the phrase #Ferrantefever flying from their fingertips. An essay from BBC Culture even quotes Hilary Clinton saying that she “could not stop reading or thinking about'' Ferrante's series (2020). In 2016, literary tensions erupted over an investigative report which claimed to reveal the true identity of Elena Ferrante. Americans implored, how sexist! The French snarled, how rude!  Meanwhile, Elena Ferrante worked on weaving more clues into her next brilliant novel, The Lying Life of Adults. 

        I don’t have much in common with former First Lady and Presidential Candidate Hilary Clinton, but we did have similar experiences reading Elena Ferrant’s work. Struck by “Ferrante Fever,” I became obsessed with the story. A young girl named Giovanna, the daughter of two academic parents, overhears her father call her ugly behind closed doors. In fact, he hides his true meaning behind a worse analogy, which Giovanna discerns for herself, “So it was that, at the age of twelve, I learned from my father’s voice, muffled by the effort to keep it low, that I was becoming like his sister, a woman in whom - I had heard him say as long as I could remember - ugliness and spite were combined to perfection,” (Ferrante 14). Defying her parents' wishes, Giovanna sets out to meet her hideous aunt, on a quest to define ugliness and beauty, deceit and truth, evil and good. 

        Following familiar themes of friendship, female sexuality, social class and fraught familial relationships, Ferrante depicts growing up in 20th century Italy with a rawness that is at once revolting and irresistible. As Giovanna becomes closer with her Aunt Vitorria, she encounters a new world of independence. She expects to meet her aunt and feel repulsed. Instead, she learns to dance: “I climbed on her feet, and she whirled me around the room with great precision and elegance until the music ended,” (Ferrante 57). When I opened the pages of Elena Ferrante’s newest novel, The Lying Life of Adults, I climbed onto the feet of Aunt Vitorria too, and whirled around her apartment, down into “the depths of the depths of Naples,” through the bustling streets of Milan and back into my parents’ living room. It was a trip, and one which felt strangely familiar despite the fact that I’ve never been to Italy before. 

        In a 2018 interview with the LA Times, when asked where her “vital energy” comes from, Ferrante responds, “ Of course, when I write, I draw on parts of myself, of my memory, that are agitated, fragmented, that make me uncomfortable. A story, in my view, is worth writing only if its core comes from there.” In many ways, Ferrante’s true name seems irrelevant because she unabashedly shares her soul with her readers. Although some may be quick to point out the distinction between author and art, a few excerpts from The Lying Life of Adults reveal why Ferrante's expression must come from experience. In one painful passage, Giovanna explores the roots of her adolescent rebellion when she fails school. “I discovered that I wanted people to know,” Ferrante makes Giovanna reflect, “That failure, after all, was my only mark of distinction. I hoped that my mother would tell her colleagues at school, the people she corrected proofs and wrote for, and that my father- my father especially - would tell those who respected and loved him: Giovanna doesn't like me and her mother, she doesn’t learn, she doesn’t work hard, she’s ugly inside and out like her aunt, maybe she’ll go and live with her, in the Macello neighborhood, in the Industrial Zone,” (138). Ferrante herself only knew that My Brilliant Friend had potential when her father gave his hard-won approval. Perhaps Giovanna’s character is a figure of Ferrante’s childhood, a memory of what it’s like to fail and to crave parental validation.   

        This is what makes Ferrante’s writing irresistible: it scares us. It drags us through the deeply repressed moments of female adolescence (ah the horror!) and swats at cobwebs in the parts of our brain we have willingly allowed to grow dusty. With writing that is both terrifying and exhilarating, Ferrante grabs her readers like Aunt Vitorria teaching Giovanna to dance: “She made a sudden movement, grabbed me by the waist, held me tight. Her bosom gave off an odor of pine needles in the sun,” (Ferrante 57). Through a strange enchantment, Ferrante deals with the delicate condition of memory as she recalls “agitated, fragmented” sentiments and experiences in the young female consciousness. As Giovanna grapples with abstract judgements like failure and ugliness, she realizes that there is beauty in the fragmented parts of life. While you search for Ferrante in her characters, you may end up stumbling upon the forgotten parts of yourself: the vulnerable, uncomfortable, and poetic.