It's a constant fight to stay within the bounds of acceptable femininity. "To write clearly is to speak from the depths of the maternal womb," writes Ferrante in her hallucinatory divorce novel, The Days of Abandonment, but these are words spoken by a visitation, and who knows the motives of hauntings? James Wood, in the New Yorker, identified Ferrante's work with Écriture Féminine, defined by critic Elaine Showalter as "the inscription of the feminine body" in writing, but Ferrante's women are never so aware of their bodies as when they are alienated from them. Lila, who experiences moments of existential nausea which she calls "dissolving margins", is seeking "a structure that could fully contain her, all of her, without her cracking or the figures around her cracking." My Brilliant Friend begins with a middle-aged Lila's seeming crackup, and disappearance.įerrante's notorious reclusiveness has led to speculation in Italy: are these her personal stories? Or is it the opposite: could she be a man, disguising her gender for greater credibility? In Fragments, a tellingly slim collection of her interviews and public correspondence, Ferrante admits the books have autobiographical elements, but she also insists that a good novel remains mysterious as "the gifts of Befana", a Neapolitan Mother Christmas who takes, perhaps significantly, the form of an old woman.
"Lila was too much for anyone," says Lenú, whose full name, like the pen name of her creator, is Elena. The moment Lenú first commits to their friendship is also an act in imitation of Lila's cruelty. In this book, the girls identities are unstable, and they repeatedly swap roles: when Lenú is beautiful, Lila is not, and when Lenú temporarily abandons school, it seems Lila could become the scholar. Her powerful, nuanced, urgent take on this old story of female friendship shot through with rivalry begins with the first book in the series, My Brilliant Friend (published in English in 2012). She was born in Naples, perhaps around the same time as the two heroines of her Neapolitan books, growing up in the aftermath of the second world war.
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