New Stories, Old Pieces: On Elena Ferrante's "The Lying Life of Adults"
Elena Ferrante, transl. Ann Goldstein | The Lying Life of Adults: A Novel | Europa Editions | 2020 | 324 Pages
Whether or not we are writers, we all tell stories. Everyone has their fallback anecdotes: the time they added salt instead of sugar, the time their car broke down 30 miles out of Minneapolis, that thing their father used to say about religion. We tell these stories over and over; we exaggerate; we shift details to suit the situation. Factuality was never the point. We learn about each other not from the stories themselves but from how we tell them.
Bestselling Italian author Elena Ferrante is a storyteller by trade. She writes under a pseudonym, and though there have been multiple attempts to unveil the “real” Ferrante, the general consensus is that we should all respect her decision to remain anonymous. She grants occasional email interviews, with the caveat that her answers apply only to the Ferrante persona. If she says she grew up in Naples and her mother was a dressmaker, this statement may not be true for the writer behind the Ferrante name. Elena Ferrante is, in effect, a fictional character.
Her latest novel, The Lying Life of Adults, tells the story of a girl named Giovanna growing up in an upper-class family in Naples. Like Ferrante’s other work, it’s been translated into English by Ann Goldstein, with the packerback coming this September. In the novel, Giovanna’s parents get divorced, she falls in love, her world view is shattered and then expanded. Ferrante plays deftly within the stereotypical teenage-girl-coming-of-age structure. When Giovanna loses her (heterosexual) virginity, it’s both the climax of the novel and a complete non-event. She doesn’t let the boy kiss her or take his shirt off. She sees sex as a box she needs to tick to become an adult. To the reader, it’s clear the event is totally unnecessary—she’s already matured—yet Giovanna finds it important to give physical shape to her mental and emotional world.
Perhaps she feels that personality and physicality should always agree; she becomes convinced that mean thoughts will make her ugly, and good ones pretty. When she sees a photo of a man with a low forehead and bright eyes, she’s distressed; her father has always told her that low foreheads are a sign of stupidity, while her mother likes to say that sparkling eyes indicate intelligence. “I was confused,” she writes, “By a gaze that was in evident contradiction to the forehead.” Meanwhile her parents are separating, no one is acting as they ought to, and she just wants the world to make sense.
In any case, Giovanna is desperate to impose form onto her life. She introduces scenes with phrases like, “Maybe that’s where I should locate the end of my childhood.” When her crush tells her she’s beautiful, she thinks, “[He] perceived that I felt ugly and lost, and he wanted to console me with a comforting lie, that’s probably the reason he said that. But what if he had really seen some beauty in me that I don’t know how to see, if he really liked me?” She has all the pieces—his words, her face in the mirror—but doesn’t know what to do with them. Giovanna needs a story to fit them together.
The same can be said of Giovanna’s bracelet. Omnipresent in the novel, it changes wrists continually, meaning something different to each wearer. It’s stolen, gifted, returned, re-gifted. Each character knows only a piece of its history, and each appearance reframes those that preceded it. At first, it’s a present from Giovanna’s aunt at her birth. But then it changes—we learn that instead of keeping it for his daughter to wear when she got older, Giovanna’s father once gave the bracelet to his mistress. Giovanna stays awake at night trying to understand. She frames it as a fairytale: the bracelet holds dark magic, and her father wanted to keep her safe from it. Realizing that doesn’t make sense (why would he give it to someone else he cared about, instead of throwing it away?), she revises: he let this other woman try it on, and the bracelet’s powers hypnotized him, binding him to its wearer forever. Again, the simple facts of a situation are not enough for Giovanna. In order to understand, she needs a narrative.
The book is Ferrante’s first novel since the finishing the Neapolitan Quartet, the series that rocketed her to international fame, and many readers may be surprised at how familiar parts of it feel. Naples is described in the same terms: labyrinthine, vertically organized along class distinctions. Giovanna’s friendship with two sisters, Angela and Ida, is competitive and fraught with sexual tension just like Lenu and Lila’s relationship in the quartet. Recycling material isn’t new for Ferrante, though. The same images, themes, and figures weave their way in and out of all her earlier work, in much the same way that the bracelet moves through her latest novel. Just like Giovanna can recast the words of her crush (“You’re very beautiful”) again and again, trying out different meanings, Ferrante continues to make new stories out of old pieces.
On the first page of the book, Ferrante writes the following:
Everything—the spaces of Naples, the blue light of a frigid February, those words—remained fixed. But I slipped away, and am still slipping away, within these lines that are intended to give me a story, while in fact I am nothing, nothing of my own, nothing that has really begun or really been brought to completion: only a tangled knot, and nobody, not even the one who at this moment is writing, knows if it contains the right thread for a story.
With that phrase, “the one who at this moment is writing,” it’s hard not to read the paragraph as coming at least partly from Ferrante herself. It’s not the first time she’s drawn purposeful links between herself and her protagonists: the Neapolitan Quartet is narrated by a woman named Elena, a bold choice. So perhaps Ferrante too craves a story. Perhaps we should see each novel—each recasting of the same pieces—as another attempt to give shape to her own life.
Is it dangerous to conflate characters with their authors? Absolutely. Especially when that author has taken such pains to avoid the public eye. But Ferrante is separate from the writer behind Ferrante. In an interview with the Paris Review, she writes, “If the author doesn’t exist outside the text, inside the text she offers herself, consciously adds herself to the story, exerting herself to be truer than she could be in the photos of a Sunday supplement, at a book launch, at a literary festival, in some television broadcast, receiving a literary prize.”
The Lying Life of Adults underlines this point. Biographical details don’t allow us to understand a person. Knowing what someone said is not the same as knowing what they meant. Our true selves appear only through the act of storytelling. We get to know Giovanna by watching her juggle multiple versions of her life rather than by reading one clear interpretation of it. And this, too, is how we should hope to know Ferrante.