The Lying Life of Adults: A Novel

"Well, everyone knows the Quartet already. This book didn’t get so much coverage, which I found interesting. One of the things recurring themes in the Quartet is how the protagonist dreads becoming her mother, and this is a relationship that Ferrante has worked on through her fiction from the very beginning, and it’s there in The Lying Life of Adults as well. That’s just one strand here, what it means to be part of a family. The novel captures so much of the fraught subtext, the latent violence that often lies behind the more intense relationships. It’s basically the legacy of a family fallout, and how it trickles down the generations. So it’s familiar Ferrante terrain and she does it really well here. She follows Giovanna, charting her development from a nice little twelve-year-old to a coarse teenager, but in this coming-of-age story she manages to show a whole social system, its moral codes, and almost the whole history of Italy itself. She maps that onto one family’s relationships, and particularly the relationship between the protagonist’s father and the sister he’s estranged from. In their opposition, you have the bourgeois Italians (‘Italian’ still being a contested concept) versus fierce localism; the Naples of the heights, which is all refinement and manners, versus the belly of Naples, where it’s gritty and vulgar and bodily; a modern outward-looking Italy versus a supposedly backwards, introverted community. “A family is a kind of microcosm of society as a whole” I like how this novel focuses on this one moment in time, the coming of age of Giovanna, but has that Ginzburg timelessness, because it’s a sweeping saga of social mobility and the angst that goes with that—the fear that you might betray your roots or slip back down to where you came from. The trials of defining yourself within a family, and more broadly within a society, and the lies you tell to make that happen. The conceit of the book is that all of our lives are based on lies. I think it really captures that a family is a kind of microcosm of society as a whole—the struggles within the family between man and woman, body and mind, rich and poor, educated and uneducated, are the struggles that have shaped society and family for all of history. Like I was saying earlier, it’s about looking at something you’ve seen your whole life, and finally, actually, looking at it properly—acknowledging and studying it, rather than just letting it wash over you. The book is guided by my grandma, my Nonna, who emigrated twice to England. The second time she was successful. The first time was a tragic tale—her dad died very young, she was sent back to Italy. And it’s that thing about using one person’s life to get a sense of what rhythms guide the whole family. My family has gone backwards and forwards between England and Italy—for work, for love, for any number of reasons. I thought: what happens if you just take one life, one person, and start asking questions? Where will that lead you? What I found was that it quickly becomes a tapestry, with so many threads. You start off looking at one thing, and before you know it, you’re looking at something completely surprising, thinking: ‘how did I get here? How did I get from talking to my Nonna about headaches to learning about theories of homesickness or romance novels, or whatever it is. It’s a kind of an unraveling, or you could look at it the other way—a kind of stitching together. Yeah, she calls me ‘nina’—short for ‘bambina’, ‘little girl’, a term of affection but, tellingly, a diminutive of a diminutive—I’ll always be a little girl to her, even though I’m well into my thirties, and she’ll always be the wise, worldly woman—so she’s basically saying ‘no, little girl, you don’t understand, listen while I explain, learn from me…’ I felt it really important to have her voice in it. When we talk about memoirs, we describe someone as a ‘character’, like in a novel or film, even though they’re real. But in that word, ‘character’, there’s a very honest acknowledgment of the fact that all people are constructs, you know? Creations. And I wanted to make sure her character’s voice was there in the book. Elizabeth Jane Howard did write a memoir of herself and her family called Slipstream , which is really good. But I’m not choosing that, I’m being guided by Ginzburg, and her seeing fiction as a vessel of truth."