The series My Brilliant Friend has come to an end

As I have written about in previous posts, the Italian author Elena Ferrante wrote a brilliant series of books, My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child (the Neapolitan quartet), that were turned into a television series called My Brilliant Friend that currently airs on MAX (formerly HBO Max) (A New Yorker in Oslo: Elena Ferrante's brilliant Neapolitan quadrilogy; A New Yorker in Oslo: My Brilliant Friend is a brilliant HBO series). 

The series is one of the few television series that manages to capture the intricacies and the emotional depth of the books and to describe the complicated and often warped friendship between Lila and Elena. It also manages to capture the heavy and claustrophobic atmosphere of the Naples neighborhood where they live, in an almost perfect way. Each book was filmed as one season, so there were four seasons in all. Each season, with the exception of season four, consisted of eight episodes; season four was ten episodes long. We watched the last episode tonight, which was an emotional experience for me, knowing that the story of Lila and Elena's lives has now come to an end. We will never know what happens to Lila; she disappears from Elena's life without a trace. Elena, now in her sixties and living in Turin, has had no contact with Lila for a number of years prior to her disappearance. Apparently Lila had not wanted that, even though they parted as good friends when Elena left Naples with Imma to move to Turin. Lila's son Gennaro is understandably upset about his mother's disappearance, and calls Elena to ask if she has heard from her. She has not. It is at that point that Elena decides to write the entire story of their lives together--when she knows that Lila has left her life for good. She is angry at her for disappearing, but at the same time I think she realized she was finally free. 

There are several ways to interpret the ending. One afternoon, after Elena has been out walking her dog, she returns home to find a medium-sized package in her mailbox. When she opens it, she finds the dolls that she and Lila had when they were children, and which they threw into a damp dark cellar at Lila's prompting. When they went to retrieve them a day or so later, they couldn't find them. Lila said at that time that she knew who had stolen them, but as it turns out, it was likely Lila who had retrieved them and hidden them away for many years. Why, no one knows. The motif of the hidden doll reminds me of Ferrante's other book--The Lost Daughter--where the protagonist, a middle-aged woman, finds a doll on the beach and hides it away in her vacation apartment, fully knowing that there is a little girl on vacation with her parents who has lost that doll. There was an evil streak in Lila that surfaced from time to time; she could be mean and spiteful, and then suddenly nice and even kind. She pulled Elena toward her and then pushed her away. It was that kind of friendship, and Elena let it evolve that way, even accepting her role in its evolution. She rarely stood up to Lila, choosing more often to observe and reflect on the ups and downs of their friendship (and to eventually write about them). So if it was Lila who sent the dolls to Elena, why then? It was Lila's way of admitting that she had lied all along to Elena about what happened to the dolls. It was Lila's way of letting go of the past, of apologizing, of moving forward with her life after all the suffering she had been through (the disappearance of her daughter Tina) and all the suffering she caused others. But what happened to Lila? Did she 'disappear' in order to live the rest of her life on her terms? Did she commit suicide (she had talked about wanting to be deleted from society)? Did she meet an unhappy end? Did she reunite with Enzo and did they live 'happily ever after'? Did she spend the rest of her life wandering around Italy searching for her daughter Tina? Or did she accept that Tina was probably dead? If so, then she could move on with her life, live and travel without the burden of grief. And to be a bit provocative, is Elena Ferrante (a pseudonym) really Lila, or Elena? I have always thought Elena. We'll never know the answers to these questions.  

I think that with the arrival of the lost dolls, Elena understood that she and Lila were now free of each other, free to pursue their lives independently of one another. It was a strange complex friendship and a rather unhealthy one. They were both dependent upon each other for different reasons; Elena on Lila because Lila encouraged her to write and forced/challenged her to have confidence in her abilities, even though she was envious of her. Elena was also driven by fear--fear that Lila would capture Nino's heart, and a fear (that she never completely shook) that Lila was (or would have been) the better writer. Lila needed Elena because Elena provided her with emotional and mental stability and a sense of normalcy. She could depend on Elena. Lila was emotionally-unstable, whereas Elena was more rational and cold in the sense of being the observer. 

I will miss this series, miss the depiction of women's lives in Italy over many years, starting in the 1950s when Lila and Elena were children in Naples. How painful it was to see how difficult it was (and still is) for women to write and raise a family under a patriarchal system (personal and societal) where men ruled, and the often disturbing family dramas and conflicts. Elena, despite her success as a writer, is foolish when it comes to her love for Nino, who is nothing but a shallow womanizer like his father--an intellectual pretender. Nothing I write here can really do justice to either the books or the series; they have to be experienced in order to understand the depth of the emotional lives of two Italian women who each considered the other to be the more brilliant friend. But it was Elena who wrote the books, and who considered Lila to be her brilliant friend. Lila was fiercely intelligent, even brilliant, but her talents were thwarted from a very young age by an unsupportive and abusive father and by the subsequent mistakes she made as she grew up. Watching the series, you realize how important it is that children get a supportive and loving start in life and the chance to amount to something. Without that, their lives are often stunted and damaged. Elena's father gave her that chance despite the patriarchal rigidity of their generation, Lila's father did not. 

The lies we tell others and ourselves

I am currently watching The Lying Life of Adults series on Netflix, based on the book of the same name by Elena Ferrante. I read the book in 2021 and wrote a post about it (A New Yorker in Oslo: Elena Ferrante's The Lying Life of Adults (paulamdeangelis.blogspot.com). The Netflix series encompasses six episodes, and I've already seen four of them. Elena Ferrante has been involved in the writing of the script for the series, and you can always tell when she has had her hand in things. There is a certain identifying mark that raises the overall quality to very good (this series: The Lying Life of Adults (TV Series 2023– ) - IMDb) to superb (My Brilliant Friend on HBO: My Brilliant Friend (TV Series 2018– ) - IMDb ). The series was created by Edoardo De Angelis (every time I see his last name on the screen I have to smile since it is my last name as well, spelled the same way). His wife Pina Turco plays Nella, whose husband Andrea leaves her for Costanza, a family friend. But by extension, he leaves his teenage daughter Giovanna as well. The series is about Giovanna (very well-acted by Giordana Marengo) and her growing up amidst the turmoil around her: her parents' separation and divorce; her father's eventual remarriage to Costanza and his new home in Posillipo (an affluent area of Naples) on the Gulf of Naples; Giovanna's introduction to her aunt Vittoria (wonderfully-acted by Valeria Golino) and to the family of Enzo, Vittoria's now-deceased lover; her relationships with her two best friends, Angela and Ida, who just happen to be Costanza's daughters. But it is her relationship with Vittoria (Andrea's sister whom he cannot abide) that changes her life and moves her firmly into adulthood. 

Andrea, Nella, Costanza, Mariano (Costanza's ex-husband), and Vittoria all lie to others and to themselves. Andrea and Costanza have lived a lie for years by having an affair and keeping it secret. Nella has either refused to see the truth or has turned a blind eye to it; in any case, she continues to defend Andrea and to call him a good man. Vittoria initially seems to be the most honest of all the adults in Giovanna's life, but she too turns out to be a liar who tells herself and others (particularly Giovanna) that she loved only Enzo and has never been with another man since he died, but this is not true. Giovanna learns that she cannot trust very many people, which of course is the demarcation between childhood and adulthood. What do you do with that knowledge? What do you do when you find out that the adults in your life are no better at handling/navigating their lives than the teenagers they are trying to raise? What do you do when you find out that their lives are as miserable and chaotic as yours? 

The lies we tell others and ourselves, when others ask us how we are, how our lives are going. How many people really answer honestly? We do so with those few people we love and trust, with our closest friends. We know we can trust them to listen to us without judging us, without abandoning us. That is a rarity in a world that seeks to judge (and cancel) another immediately without knowing or being interested in the facts. Of course we can ask, what is the truth? Is your side of a story truer than mine? We all lie to ourselves to some extent; we do so in order to deal with each day. We tell ourselves that our spouses and children are better than those of others we know, but the reality is otherwise. All families have problems, perhaps the same types of problems but to varying degrees. All families have squabbles, some have real fights, and some are on the outs with other family members for entire lifetimes. We may not have much of a relationship with a sibling, but we say that he or she has a busy life and we talk to them when we can. A spouse may not be all that involved in the family life at home, and we make the same excuse--he or she has a demanding job that keeps him or her busy. Those who are workaholics know that they are overworking to avoid something else in their lives, perhaps an unhappy home life, and those who are diehard alcoholics, drug addicts and overeaters tell themselves that they have their addictions under control, that they can quit drinking, doing drugs, or overeating any time they want. But deep down inside, they know the truth; they can't quit overworking, drinking to excess, doing drugs, or overeating, not without help and a lot of motivation to change. Lying to ourselves, even just a little, helps to mitigate the intensity of our problems. And for most of us, it does; we get through each day without major calamities ensuing. But for those with serious problems, those problems just get worse. 

It might not be a good thing if we were always honest about our thoughts and feelings in relation to others. Little white lies help us survive in what could be awkward situations with loved ones. We do our best to be truthful, but sometimes you have to weigh the situation and ask yourself if others (or you yourself) can tolerate hearing the truth or the answers to the questions they've asked. I think of those I know with health problems; is it better for them to hear that their overall prognosis could be good if they do this or that, rather than dismal because of the type of illness they have or because of one's hereditary tendencies? Nobody wants to be told straight out that they are going to die in a few months or years. And if people are told that, they often want to consider themselves the outliers--those few who fall outside the norm. Can you blame people for thinking this way? I think we are hotwired to think this way to some degree, due to the idea of self-preservation and the instinct for survival. We lie to ourselves in the hope that it will turn out alright. And sometimes it does. 

My blog posts about My Brilliant Friend

For those of you who are just now discovering the HBO series My Brilliant Friend, I can say that you are in for a real treat. I've watched all three seasons to date; the fourth season has been announced and production is underway, with new actresses to play the parts of Elena and Lila. I'm very much looking forward to the new season. The series is directed by Saverio Costanzo, Alice Rohrwacher, and Daniele Luchetti. And if you want to start with the books by Elena Ferrante on which the series is based, you can find them on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. 

Here are two posts I wrote in 2019 and 2020 about the books and the series respectively; I'm posting them again today: 

A New Yorker in Oslo: Elena Ferrante's brilliant Neapolitan quadrilogy (paulamdeangelis.blogspot.com)

A New Yorker in Oslo: My Brilliant Friend is a brilliant HBO series (paulamdeangelis.blogspot.com)

2018 - Max Richter - My Brilliant Friend (OST)

Wonderful musical score to the brilliant HBO series--My Brilliant Friend. I'm now watching season 3 which corresponds to book 3 (Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay) of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quadrilogy. Season 3 will end shortly; at least I can look forward to season 4. Quality television all the way--a pearl in a sea of mostly garbage. 

 

Men who leave and men who stay

We're back in Elena Ferrante territory today. Apologies to her for paraphrasing one of the book titles in her Neapolitan quadrilogy--Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. I finished Days of Abandonment today; it was written in 2002, prior to the Neapolitan quadrilogy. The latter books are more riveting than Days of Abandonment, but Days of Abandonment has its riveting moments as well.

Men don't come off very well in Ferrante's books. They are mostly sexual predators at heart, constantly looking at other women, faithless, disloyal, and uncaring opportunists. They are not child-friendly nor are they really interested in family life. As Olga in Days of Abandonment says to Mario, who has abandoned her and their two children for a woman almost half his age (Carla), "you are an opportunist and a traitor". Which he is. Unfortunately he is not much more than that as written by Ferrante. The book is really about Olga and her breakdown after he leaves her. She must cope with all of the mess while taking care of her two children Gianni and Ilaria and the family dog Otto. She doesn't do a very good job of any of it and she knows it. Her identity unravels and she is forced to do the work of finding out who she is at the age of thirty-eight. She doesn't particularly like what she sees--a woman who gave up her writing career and her identity to marry Mario and have children. The roles of wife and mother became her identities. She thought her marriage was happy; perhaps it was. Even if marriages are happy, one partner can always be unfaithful and stay in the marriage, or be unfaithful and leave. Mario does both, actually. He starts his affair with Carla when she is still a teenager and leaves Olga for her when Carla turns twenty. He closes the door on one life and begins another. He does not tell Olga where he is or with whom he is living. She doesn't even get to know where he is living and does not find out about Carla until midway through the book. And then all the pieces come together for her. The description of her breakdown is disturbing and uncomfortable, perhaps as it should be, but it dragged on too long for my taste. Otto dies after being poisoned with something he ate that was laced with strychnine while Olga was out walking him in the park. Her son Gianni becomes ill with a high fever. She feels like she is falling apart. But this experience made its point. 'The only way out is through'. By the time Olga has gotten through it, she discovers she no longer loves Mario. It's as though she has stepped outside her own life and become an observer. She watches as her children visit Mario and meet Carla, she listens as they praise Carla, she eventually deals with Mario adult to adult, she reclaims her identity as a writer, she listens to him complain that his children will ruin his relationship with Carla, and she finds that she really doesn't care about any of it. She understands that Mario is an opportunist and a traitor and tells him that. She no longer needs him. In other words, she grew up. She grew out of a stale banal marriage that her husband abandoned years ago in secret. She stepped out from under Mario's shadow. The patriarchal dominance that has ruled her life for so long is gone. She finds that she does not want to date or be social or be with other men, at least not if she has no say in how these events are to happen. But eventually she starts an affair with the older musician who lives below her and that is how the book ends. She is nearly forty and she is writing again. The rest of it is just the life around her in all its messiness and discomfort. She learns to live with both. Days of Abandonment is an angry book, but the anger is directed both at Mario and at herself for giving up so much of herself. No one asked her to do that; she chose the prison of the wife/mother identity and became entrapped. She could have continued writing, she could have insisted that Mario help more with the children. So many things she should have done, but she didn't. She tries to understand why Mario left her, and discovers that she really didn't know him. She constructed the idea of a happy marriage around them; his idea of what their marriage was did not seem to interest her. Or if it did, she ignored his attempts to break free. But in any case, nothing she could have done would have kept Mario from straying. He was a man who leaves, not one who stays. 

There is autobiographical content in her novels to be sure. Exactly where, in which novels, remains a mystery and that's fine with me. Ferrante writes under a pseudonym for reasons that only she alone knows. This places most of the focus on the stories, where it should be. But after having read a number of her books--the Neapolitan quadrilogy, Troubling Love, Days of Abandonment, and The Lying Life of Adults, it seems to me that she has dealt with a number of emotional and psychological issues (traumas?) that have preoccupied her throughout her life, through her writing. Men cannot be trusted to be faithful since they leave their wives for other (often younger) women. Love is mostly about sexual bonding and less about loyalty and empathy. Mothers and daughters have volatile relationships; mothers love their daughters but are also jealous of them, particularly if the daughters have the chance to pursue higher education while they did not. The relationships between mothers and children generally are also precarious; they are fraught with frustration, weariness, irritation and real anger in addition to the maternal bond of love. Ferrante makes it clear that children change everything in a marriage, for better and/or for worse. Her ambivalence about the roles of wife and mother is clear throughout her writing. She has no qualms about bringing up the 'worse'--being chained to these small beings who demand attention and love, the banality of childcare, the reduction of woman's role to wife and mother and not much else. Ferrante is an Italian novelist but her novels are international bestsellers, which is illustrative of just how relevant her themes are on a global level. The interesting thing is that Days of Abandonment was written in 2002; it could have been written in the 1970s, when the women's movement was dealing with many of the same issues--women's identities, self-realization, marriage versus single life, having children or not. It tells me that the issues that women face now are not so much different than those they faced in the 1970s or those that our mothers faced in their generation. Men left their wives and children back in the 1950s and 1960s too, for many of the same reasons as they do now. If you ask them directly, they will answer selfishly. They want a woman who is sexually exciting, who is interested in sex. They want a woman who pays attention to them. What they want is often at odds with what they get from marriage and family, where there is often limited time for both sex and personal attention. And so it goes. As long as couples have children and children become the focus of marriage, there will always be men who leave and men who stay. And perhaps women who leave and women who stay. Perhaps it's worth repeating that one should choose one's life partner carefully and marry a person who is faithful and loving. But how do you know that when you marry? How can you be sure of how the future will turn out? You can't, so you do the best you can and commit to the choice you make. How it turns out is often the stuff of novels. 

Elena Ferrante's The Lying Life of Adults

I begin Elena Ferrante's novels with a mixture of fascination and dread. Fascination, because everything I've read by her has gripped me. Her novels are riveting and her words flow on the pages, moving me along and immersing me in her Italy, her Naples, and her family dramas that she has carefully constructed. Dread, because I know that this immersion will stir up the mud in my own life and memory; it will murky the waters that I think are so clear, and yet when I dive deeper, I know they aren't.

How is it that one person, one writer, can speak to me and to so many people at the same time? She has an uncanny way of getting right to the core of what drives families apart and what keeps them together. She describes the behaviors, utterances and dramas that comprise the push and pull of family life, mostly without judging them, and that is where the fear comes in. Because you know that the behaviors she writes about are real and often violent to the spirit and body. Sometimes she judges them, but only within the contexts of her characters, the ones who want to escape the oppression, claustrophobia, and violence of family life. She allows them to judge, and we follow their attempts to escape, which are seemingly successful, but we know that somewhere down the line, the past will knock on their door and demand its due. At some point, they will face the same situations that they ran from, and come face to face with their early selves—the ones who said that they would never tolerate this or that behavior, the ones who said that they would never behave like their parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents. They experience the human frailties, deceptions, betrayals, frustrations, rage, and even violence (psychological and physical) that can be part of family life. The characters in her books are flawed human beings, like we all are. Perhaps that is part of her appeal. She explains some parts of our lives for us; I know she does that for me. I finish her novels thinking, yes, that helps to explain this or that family member’s behavior, or utterances, or bizarre points of view.

Everyone lies in Ferrante’s novels. Adults lie, but so do children and teenagers. The Lying Life of Adults is really the story of how teenagers become adults who lie to themselves and to others. It is the story of how we become the adults we profess to hate. Giovanna, the main character who is a teenager, is acutely aware of the hypocritical behavior of the adults in her life. She has two friends she confides in, Angela and Ida, the daughters of her parents’ friends Mariano and Costanza. Her attempt to develop a relationship with her hated aunt Vittoria, her father’s sister, has far-reaching repercussions for her parents, her parents’ friends, involved children, and her own life. Vittoria is a destructive force of nature. She is (presumably) the opposite of Giovanna’s educated, intellectual and refined father, Andrea, who hates his coarse uneducated sister (the feeling is mutual), and yet, that is what Ferrante wants to show us, that at their core, both Vittoria and Andrea are the same. They are egotists and liars, they think nothing of destroying others’ lives by wanting what they want (Vittoria wanted Enzo--the husband of her friend Margherita, and Andrea wanted Costanza—the wife of his friend Mariano). They justify their betrayals of spouses and families and lie to themselves about how ‘noble’ their intentions are. Nella, Andrea’s wife, is crushed by his betrayal and their eventual divorce, but tries to live her life following the divorce as best she can. Mariano, who has cheated on Costanza often, is also lost; eventually Nella and Mariano find each other despite Nella’s protests to the contrary. Giovanna is witness to all of these happenings. At the same time, she becomes friends with Vittoria (who worshipped Enzo), Margherita, and Margherita’s children (Corrado, Tonino, and Giuliana). Vittoria dominates Margherita and her children’s lives; she tells them how to live and what to do and not to do. The relationship between Vittoria and Margherita is strange and one I found hard to understand, but for the purposes of the book, I accepted it. But I know very few people in real life who would have become friends with their husbands’ mistresses.

Vittoria brought to the surface memories of my father’s eldest sister Carmela, who was also not much-liked in my family. Unlike Vittoria, she was considered to be good-looking; she was a refined woman with many intellectual and cultural interests. But she was a drama queen, and no family gathering ever ended pleasantly when she was present. She was unhappily married to one of my father’s childhood friends, which didn’t help matters. My father probably felt pressured to take sides, and he took his sister’s side against his friend. My mother and my aunt did not get along at all; my mother found her domineering, controlling, and nosy. Carmela and her husband eventually divorced; she lived alone afterward until she died, but did have a lover whom she could have married but chose not to. After one too many unpleasant family gatherings when we were children, my father and mother decided not to see her anymore, and by extension, we were not to see her either. After my father died, my sister and I made an effort to re-establish contact with her. We found her to be a decent person, but of course by that time she was old and in a different frame of mind. I think she was happy to see us again, but our lives were busy and we didn’t see her often. She died eight years after my father.

I could relate to those feelings that Ferrante describes—remaining loyal to parents while wondering why we all couldn’t just get along, and feeling guilty for wanting to have some kind of relationship with my aunt. My aunt made an effort to remember our birthdays with gifts and cards, but they were never well-received, and eventually she ceased to make the effort. I remember when my grandmother died, I was around twelve or so. Frustrations and anger came to the surface, people said things they probably regretted, and the war only intensified. It was difficult to deal with all those feelings as a child. But I knew even then that this kind of family life was oppressive and claustrophobic, and I wanted no part of it. And for the most part, I have managed to escape it, but not without many mistakes and poor decisions of my own before I got to a place in life with which I could be comfortable. Reading Ferrante reminds me of my early family life, and it’s a mixed blessing, as I wrote at the beginning of this post—I am fascinated by what she manages to stir up in me, and fearful of it at the same time. Like a moth to the flame, as the old saying goes. I know I will get burned. Unlike the moth, I survive being burned, but it is a strange experience nonetheless.

 

My Brilliant Friend is a brilliant HBO series

We're in the midst of a corona virus pandemic and lockdown, which I'm contemplating writing about at some point. I probably will in future posts; right now it feels like overload--everywhere you turn, there's more news and info about the virus. I've been trying to adjust to working at home five days a week, to going out very little except to shop for groceries and to take an occasional walk, and to stopping myself from freaking out every time I turn on the news. I do less and less of the latter, because it causes me such anxiety. All of us are watching videos about how to wash your hands properly, how to disinfect all items that come into your home, and how to practice social distancing and self-isolation. I'm not having major problems with the latter; stay home and flatten the goddamn curve. Keep the healthcare professionals healthy by doing so. Stop complaining that your life has been curtailed if you are complaining--no one wants to hear it. We're all in the same boat. And it doesn't help the rest of us who want to try to help the doctors and nurses stay well.

So, in these strange and apocalyptic times, what have I been doing for enjoyment? Once my work is done for the day, I watch the brilliant, moving, riveting Italian series on HBO--My Brilliant Friend. I wrote a long post in February 2019 about this series of four books, the Neapolitan quadrilogy, by Elena Ferrante: https://paulamdeangelis.blogspot.com/search?q=elena+ferrante . They haunt me to this day, and the HBO series will haunt me for the rest of my life--it is that perfect. Never before have I experienced a film or series that captures so perfectly the books on which they are based. I watch the series (so far books 1 and 2--My Brilliant Friend and The Story of a New Name--have been filmed) and it feels so real--this is what it must have been like to grow up in Lila and Elena's small neighbourhood in Naples in the 1950s. On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd give the HBO series a 10. Like the books, it evokes something so utterly visceral and primal in me; it is phenomenally well-acted. I feel like I am right there with the characters--in their homes, on the dusty streets of the neighbourhood, at school, hanging out with friends in the neighbourhood or at the beach on Ischia, and experiencing the angst and pain of first love and rejection. All the actors and actresses are superlative; the two young girls who play the preteen Lila and Elena (Ludovica Nasti and Elisa del Genio) are incredible, as are the actresses who play the teenage Lila and Elena (Gaia Girace and Margherita Mazzucco). I cannot imagine the actresses themselves not being affected by the parts they play. It would be interesting to hear their thoughts on the series. I hope there will be a season 3 and 4 so that all the books are covered. It will only get more interesting from hereon in. I know it takes time to produce the series; season 1 came out in 2018 and season 2 in 2020; if all goes according to plan, perhaps season 3 will show up in 2022 and season 4 in 2024. I hope the current pandemic doesn't delay the filming for too long, I read yesterday that the virus is now rampaging through the south of Italy. We'll see what the future brings. In any case, I can wholeheartedly recommend this series, and the music soundtrack by Max Richter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W14_WJatKSE

Elena Ferrante's brilliant Neapolitan quadrilogy

I just finished reading Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quadrilogy, and I recommend it highly: My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child. It would be hard for me to summarize her books adequately in this post, but the impressions they made on me will stay with me forever. Italian men, at least at the time when the author was young (1940s and 1950s), do not come off well at all, at least in the non-educated part of Italian society, specifically, Naples at that time. They beat their wives and children regularly; the women accepted it and the children became afraid of their fathers. Men raped their wives/forced them to have sex. Poverty was rampant, as was corruption. Many of the married men had lovers with whom they started new families while still married to the first wives. Homosexual men were beaten to death. Violence was a huge part of the society at that time.

Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym for the author of these powerful books. Given their subject matter, given the author’s desire for privacy, I think it is fitting that she wrote that way. Why do we need to know who she really was? The important thing is the books, the message, the freedom with which she wrote, not holding back about anything, really. She writes from a gut place; sometimes I got the feeling that the books just poured out of her. They are fiercely honest books, filled with events that are embarrassing, cringe-worthy, frightening, and horrific (the abuse that Lila endures, for example, at the hands of her first husband Stefano, and earlier, at the hands of her father). Elena and Lila are lifelong friends; their friendship is an odd one, not easily explained and not easy to read about. It is raw, honest, at times abusive (at least Lila’s behavior toward Elena), but there is a love there that is hard to define. They seem to need each other; Lila needs for Elena to become a successful writer (she does); Elena needs for Lila to break free of Naples and to reach her potential as the smart woman she is (it is unclear if she really manages that by the end of the series). But Lila is the person who Elena looks up to. Lila is by turns brash, aggressive, rude, mean, non-compliant, ambitious, passive, passive-aggressive, kind, loving, and then not—all over again. She is mercurial and beautiful—the type of woman that all men want, at least in Elena’s eyes. She is also fiercely intelligent, which Elena talks about often--but her ambition for higher education is thwarted by her family and her circumstances. Elena is also beautiful, but much less sure of herself, and certainly not mercurial and mean like Lila. 

All of us have known a Lila in our lives. They are the women who walk into a room, and it becomes quiet—all eyes on her. She is the woman that many other women fear, because she does not seem to need men in her life, even though there is always a man there. And the men fall for that type of woman because they think she will make no demands of them like most ordinary women, never realizing for a second that this is exactly the trap that Lila sets for men. She is the femme fatale who lures them in, and then uses them for all they are worth. Given her background of abuse at the hands of the men in her early life, it is perhaps no surprise that she behaves that way and that this is the type of woman she has become. Elena grows up differently; her father doesn’t directly abuse her, but he shows little interest in her. Her mother is emotionally abusive to her, and their relationship is strained for years. Elena is smart, and as luck would have it, her intelligence as a child is recognized by a teacher who essentially orders her parents to let her pursue higher education. Since there is no money for that in her family, the teacher helps her out with books and other materials, as does Lila when she first marries Stefano, who is wealthy. Elena always wonders why the teacher never did the same for Lila, whose parents also had no money. The difference was also that Elena’s parents, while resenting the teacher’s intrusion into their lives, obeyed her orders, whereas Lila’s parents would never have done so. So Lila was not as lucky as Elena when it came to being able to pursue an education. Lila tried for years to keep up with Elena, and Elena helps her by sharing her books with her, but Lila realizes that it is impossible to keep up, and because she cannot enjoy what Elena is enjoying, she rejects it utterly and begins to snipe at Elena’s progress and success. And so it goes for many years. Most of the Lila types in this life do not end up with happy and successful lives; rather they crash and burn in middle age when their beauty starts to fade, and they often end up friendless.

Elena and Lila’s friendship is a strange mixture of caring, not caring, jealousy, envy, ambition, thwarted ambition, fear, abuse, melancholy, bitterness, sometimes happiness, but most often confusion. Elena is never sure where she has Lila, and by the time she stops caring about exactly that and begins to live life on her own terms, she is in her late twenties. By that time, she has watched the married Lila seduce Nino, her first love, run off with him to live with him, and then watch as Nino leaves her behind and disappears. Lila’s life descends into a chaotic mess, but as time goes on, she achieves some sort of success; she lives in Naples with Enzo, the man who rescues her from Stefano, and with her son Gennaro (who is Stefano’s son). They learn about the computer world together, and start their own computer company. For a while, they earn good money. But as always, life steps in, tragedy hits, and the misery starts all over again.

Elena leaves Naples and marries Pietro, and they have two daughters together. She tries to keep writing after the success of her first novel that was published shortly before her marriage, but she struggles with her ambition and trying to find time for it all—writing and taking care of a husband and family. She struggles with confidence and lack of it, with confusion, with trying to understand the society and politics around her, and with trying to understand her relationship with Lila. She feels guilty, I think, for her success, certain that it is actually Lila's doing. She never seems to be able to accept that she is just as intelligent, if not more so, than Lila. Her intelligence includes being able to adapt to situations, to accept what she cannot change. Lila never learns that, and becomes brittle as she ages. Elena is by turns reflective and realistic. She understands that even though Pietro is an academic like she is, he does not support her academic endeavors, or perhaps more correctly stated—he does not think that her academic career is as important as his own. And then Nino reappears in her life, and her life descends into chaos. Suffice it to say that Nino is a destructive force in the lives of those he inserts himself into. Smart women, foolish choices. Lila and Elena are two women who fit that bill.

Elena Ferrante grew up in the 1940s and 1950s; we grew up in the 1960s and 1970s. By that time, roles had changed for men and women, or at least the expectations of what men and women would have as roles when they married. Feminism changed a lot of things, for better and for worse. Strangely enough, it never occurred to me when I was young that anyone would want to punish me or any other woman because we were intelligent, or try to stifle it, or try to dominate us and force us to pretend that we were not smart or that we would not use our intelligence. I understood later that there existed people—men and women—who wanted to do just that, out of envy and spite. Sometimes men were downright abusive to women who were intelligent and ambitious--the women who wanted a marriage based on equality and mutual respect. When I have spoken to priests and other adults about how women were often treated badly by husbands, some of them would say that women should ‘do their duty’ and submit to their husbands.  I once challenged a priest by asking him why women should ‘obey’ a man, as in “Wives, obey your husbands as you obey the Lord. The husband is the head of the wife, just as Christ is the head of the church people”, when so many men forgot the other saying—“Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it….” I got no answer, and that’s because there are very few men who love their wives as Christ loved the church. He knew that just as well as I did, but he couldn’t admit it.

Ferrante’s novels made me reflect on so many things, and those reflections have made me sad, as I knew they would, because they reopened personal wounds and touched on events that happened many years ago. But my life is so much richer for having read her books. When I look at our society now, there is perhaps less violence (there are laws against wife-beating and child abuse), but there is rampant use of pornography that has become increasingly violent against women. I don’t know what to make of society anymore, and I often ask if we really do want peace. I am looking for respect between the sexes, and I don’t see much of it. Even in the Catholic Church, there are huge problems when it comes to attitudes toward women. I think that the church needs a huge overhaul and that it needs to re-evaluate where it wants to go, because at present, it is no longer the moral force in the world that it used to be, and that people want it to be. I also think that it needs to clearly examine its attitudes toward women; it does defend them, yes, but it has a problem, like most of society, with highly-intelligent women. I have seen some very good marriages in my lifetime, but I would not define most as happy. Marriage works well if there is love there (including sexual love), but since no one can really define love properly, there is an element of luck in all of it. People can and do change over time, and become better people, and that will lead to happier marriages, but when I look at the pain caused by one party toward the other, when I look at all the unhappiness I have seen in marriages, I am surprised that the divorce rate isn’t higher than it is, at least in Westernized countries. Having said that, I think that marriages where both parties work (inside the home or outside of it) and respect each other’s abilities, where both have similar education and value systems, also when it comes to raising children, have a better chance of success than very traditional ones where the wife has been forced by a man, a society, a patriarchy, or a religion, to choose that traditional life, which often leads to frustration and unhappiness. Unfortunately, Catholic men are also quite unenlightened about many things concerning women, their wives/sisters/ mothers/daughters, and what women want, regardless of whether we are talking about Naples, Italy, southern Europe, Britain, or the United States. Ferrante’s novels work because she throws light on attitudes and behavior that most people would prefer stay in the shadows, in the dark. She throws open the doors and the windows and says, these are women’s lives and they are not easy lives. Pay attention.

Reflections on Elena Ferrante's Troubling Love

I never thought that I would come upon a novel that would describe so accurately some of the feelings that I had as a child and teenager about my father’s quarrelsome siblings (three sisters and one brother). Confusion is certainly one word that described my feelings about them as a young child. Fear and anxiety were other feelings. There was a lot of drama in the lives of my aunts and uncle, and that drama extended to and included us when we were together with them. Being around them was nerve-wracking, because you never knew what dramatic spectacle would unfold when you were together with them. My father was the peacemaker in his Italian family; it was a thankless role, and one I am not sure he really wanted, but one that he felt he should take on given all the problems between the siblings. He was a good and kind man, stable and dependable, not prone to unpredictable outbursts of temper or emotion. His siblings were the opposite. Their behavior led to arguments in funeral parlors, crying jags in others’ homes, angry phone calls and snippy letters, returned gifts, perceived slights, arrogant behavior, inferiority complexes, and a whole host of other strange occurrences. Children were not excluded from their punishing behavior. If they were upset with my parents, they punished us as well, e.g. by not remembering our birthdays. Only one aunt tried not to be like the others, but the others ran roughshod over her because she was a passive soul for most of her life. I can remember Sunday family dinners that ended in conflict because my mother felt that it was time for my aunts and uncle to go home since it was a school day for us the next day, whereas they felt that it was their right to sit in our living room until they decided it was time to go home. It made for uncomfortable occasions, which caused problems between my mother and father; my mother felt that my father took their side, while they felt that he cow-towed to his wife too much. Then there were the letters detailing the perceived slights and insults they felt when they visited us (again my mother’s fault although my father came in for his share of criticism as well). Or the angry phone calls where my uncle would berate my mother to my father, who again was put in the position of defending his wife against his birth family, a position he hated. He wanted so much for both sides to be friends, something I knew would never happen. Even as a child, I knew this with absolute certainty. I’m sure my mother knew it too. The differences between them were too great. I remember being fascinated by adult behavior as practiced by my father’s siblings; it was unpredictable, unstable, dramatic, emotional, anxiety-inducing, fear-inducing, and ultimately childish. I may have been a bit scared (and scarred) by it as well. My father’s siblings were not really adults, but rather children whose emotional needs had been stifled (due to circumstances beyond their control that had to do with my grandfather’s financial losses during the Depression) and which led to their becoming immature adults. That’s the way I look at them now, and that has helped me to forgive their behavior. But when I was a child, I felt torn. I was intensely loyal to my father and mother, but I wanted to have good relationships with my aunts and uncle. It was not to be. I remember feeling suffocated at times by the idea of extended family. It seemed to me that family, as my father’s siblings defined it, meant that everyone had the right to have an opinion about what everyone else in the family did. They did not understand boundaries, nor did they understand that marriage meant that you put your spouse first, ahead of them. It was expected that you would listen to them and abide by their comments and advice; if you didn’t, you were subject to their tongue-lashings and scorn, as well as their anger about being ignored or slighted. I never really knew how to deal with my aunts and uncle when they lived, and when they died, it was hard for me to feel any emotion at all. My father was sadly the first of his siblings to pass; I often think that the stress of dealing with his siblings played a large role in making him ill. I felt mostly relief when each of my father’s siblings passed. I was free, we were free, and my mother was free. Free from behavior that threatened to suffocate and to annihilate one’s idea of oneself. Because the concept of wanting a life for oneself was forbidden in my father’s family. It was not allowed that one could want that, or want to prioritize one’s spouse and children. One had to exist for one’s birth family, and make choices that always included them, no matter what. One had to put birth family first ahead of spouse and children. Looking back, I see how strange it really was. But it was my only point of reference, my only definition of adult behavior that I had, and I see now in retrospect that it was warped.

Elena Ferrante’s book Troubling Love describes an Italian family quite different than that of my father’s family. Delia, the main character, has complicated feelings about her relationship with her mother, Amalia, who separated from her physically-abusive husband when Delia was a young woman. When Amalia is found dead (drowned in the sea) and Delia goes to her funeral, it unleashes a torrent of thoughts and feelings that we are privy to as readers. The story involves other characters and sub-plots that help us to understand (without accepting or forgiving) Amalia’s husband’s jealousy and rage. But Ferrante is unflinching in her description of abusive men, for whom she has no use. She depicts them in all their garishness, naked rage, and lust. It is not a pretty picture. Ferrante is so good at describing exactly what it is that Delia feels, but at the same time, we end up wandering with Delia through her tangled nightmares as she relives the traumas and memories of her childhood and youth. There were events that happened in her childhood that should not have happened, and behavior that she and her sisters should have been shielded from. But they were not. It is the feelings Ferrante evokes via her writing that struck a nerve in me. She can describe those feelings of suffocation, of cloyingness, of bewilderment, of duty, of need, in a way that I intuitively recognize and remember.

As I grew older, I made myself a promise that my life would be so different from the lives of my aunts and uncle, and it is, but only after much reflection and risk-taking. When family life is not about love and loving others, but rather about hatred, conflict and jealousy of others, it is no small task to try to undo that or to surpass it. Troubling Love is not a book for everyone’s tastes; many people will find it disturbing and uncomfortable. It is both those things. But if you have experienced the claustrophobia of one type of family life, you will be drawn into her story, and it is well-worth the read. I don’t know if I could have appreciated Ferrante’s book had I read it in my twenties; it is the only book written by her that I have read so far, but I do think that I could manage to read more of her writing. A lot of years have passed and I have the distance necessary for me to read such stories. One can ask, why do you want to? My answer is that it is a way of facing those early fears and bewilderment and finding out that one has overcome and perhaps understood them. Literature serves many purposes; for me, it is not solely about entertainment, but rather about finding answers on this life journey. It has always been about that for me.