The Lost Daughter

"ME: The Lost Daughter tells the story of a 50-year-old literature professor named Leda who takes herself on a melancholy beach vacation, where she sees a mother and daughter playing together on the beach. Leda’s own daughters are grown, and she’s struck, instantaneously and illogically, with a kind of jealous attraction to the connection between this mother and daughter. The little girl leaves her doll on the beach, and Leda takes the doll, and watches the child suffer its loss, watches the whole family frantically search for the doll on the beach. She spends the rest of the beach vacation planning run-ins with this family so she can see what taking the doll has done to the child’s relationship with her mother, which is fraying under the pressure of this lost doll. Or rather the lost doll is bringing to the surface whatever tensions already existed in the family. SC: In the meantime, she’s been hanging out with the doll, watching the doll . . . ME: Yeah, it is. I suppose this is a part of my life I haven’t gotten to yet—the part of my life when I steal other peoples’ children’s dolls on melancholy beach trips. But it’s not inconceivable. Leda is narrating from the perspective of a woman who is post-family. She is divorced. Her daughters have grown up and left the house, and she’s not having any more children of her own. SC: She’s interesting because she’s neither old nor young. SC: She’s quite sympathetic, actually. I find her the most sympathetic of Ferrante’s women—her or Olga in Days of Abandonment . ME: Leda is haloed by a total sense of loneliness. She’s asking herself, “What could I do that would allow me to matter to someone else’s life?” SC: Or, what other forms are there besides having children and romance of mattering to other people’s lives? ME: Taking the doll becomes a small, misguided gesture toward mattering. SC: Toward belonging. ME: Exactly. But then it reminds you that belonging is never an easy thing. Belonging has terrible consequences. SC: That’s the theme of all of Ferrante. Belonging in friendship, or love, or family—and its painful side effects. ME: And that you can want to belong, and you can take steps to try to belong, and that might not be reciprocated. In fact, when you hand the doll back to its rightful owner, people might look at you like you’re crazy! [ Laughs .]"

"Yes, it’s the least truly metaphysical. But I love Ferrante so much, and especially The Lost Daughter . And I do see its underlying meaning and structure as metaphysical. It’s organized around parallels and doublings, and somewhat like The Invention of Morel , it asks what relation the double has to the original, and when we are treating other people as real and when merely as projections of our internal dramas and dreams. In The Lost Daughter these questions are largely psychological, but the pairings and repetitions are unsettling all the same. Mothers and daughters and dolls stand in for one another—doublings close enough to eerie but no so close as to be perfect, exact. These imperfect doppelgangers become a way of talking about children, which are part us, genetically, but also separate. And the doll, crucially, represents the simulacrum of a child or daughter: a stand-in that elicits the behaviour of one human being toward another absent any conviction that the other being is real and alive apart from its relationship to you. In Morel the question is: When does the reproduction become the real thing, as it approaches reality with great fidelity. The Lost Daughter deals with reproduction in the sense of actual human reproduction. When does the ‘reproduced’ diverge and separate and become distinct unto itself. The drama and devastation of the book revolves around that question. Ferrante gets at something profoundly true about parenthood, that it is both a glorious and a torturous bond. One feels a natural resentment about the demands children place on you—a desire to run away from them and live unencumbered by responsibility—yet also a desire never to be separate from them. Ferrante does an amazing job of rejecting both self-exaltation and self-abasement. She’s not writing to convince you to see her or to judge her in a particular way. She’s just unbelievably honest. And I think this unsettles people, who feel more comfortable suppressing these tensions and dilemmas and operating within the normal bounds of how we’ve been taught to talk about these things in public, affirming certain values or opinions even as we feel some inner conflict about them. I find this ruthless honestly, delivered without apology or self-righteousness, very freeing. It frees us from those dishonest stories we get roped into telling one another, these fictions people lay on top of one another and force each other to repeat and reaffirm. Literature can be a private document of inner honesty, and it can free us from the burden of living in a world made of lots and lots of small lies."