Gina Frangello on Elena Ferrante

An excerpt from Gina Frangello’s Bookmarked volume on Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels

To say that I have a few autobiographical similarities to the narrator of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend—a single novel in four installments often referred to in English as “The Neapolitan Novels” or the Neapolitan “Quartet”—would be a vast understatement. Like the narrator of all four volumes, Elena (“Lenu”) Greco, I was also born into a close-knit yet violent Italian neighborhood that no one ever seemed to leave, and, like Lenu, I fantasized constantly about “getting out,” using education as my primary propeller towards a different fate. Like Lenu, I became a writer, married a brainy introvert from a more educated family, raised children, struggled with the dichotomies between family life and making art, had a passionate affair, found myself constantly returning to the city I’d once sworn to escape, ultimately left my marriage, and struggled with the challenges of making a living as a writer while parenting three children.

Most significantly, as it is the heart of The Neapolitan Novels, my youth was also marked indelibly by my intimacy with a more beautiful, more charismatic and powerful girl who, despite her many gifts, seemed doomed. In Ferrante’s novels, this is the character of Raffaella Cerullo, called “Lina” by everyone but the narrator, who calls her only Lila. In my own memoir, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason, I dubbed this friend “Angie,” a composite character streamlined both for narrative clarity and to protect privacy. In this text, I will therefore continue to refer to that childhood friend as Angie, in part for consistency, and also because—as with the alliteration of Lenu and Lila—the other intimate girlhood/lifelong friend I’ll discuss in this book is called Alyssa (not her real name). Many of the dynamics between Lenu and Lila were also replicated in that friendship, only in a less dichotomous or binary way…which is to say that with Alyssa, sometimes I found myself the Lila, and sometimes the Lenu, over the duration of a bond that has now lasted for forty-five years. Life, unlike literature, does not often distill cleanly to one relationship through which every possible interpersonal dynamic is played out (one reason composite characters are so common, aside from privacy issues, in memoir), and so for me, Angie and Alyssa together embody in my own life the Lenu-Lila dynamic. 

Of course, Ferrante writes of girlhood in 1950s Naples (Lenu and Lila are both born in August of 1944), whereas Alyssa, Angie, and I were all born in 1968 and came of age in Chicago in the 1970s and 80s. The turbulent political landscape of Italy during some sixty years covered by Ferrante’s four novels is divergent in many ways from the (also turbulent) history of the United States, and the quintessential Italianness of the Neapolitan Novels is integral to the fate of its characters and radically different from my experience of Italian Americanness. Whereas in my old neighborhood, boys growing to men in a state of hopeless poverty and stagnation often turned to gangs or became small-time workers for the Mob, those in Lenu and Lila’s world are as likely to become involved with Communism or Fascism, go on the run for political crimes, or attend political meetings in secret, as they are to become “gangsters”—in fact, the two things seem somewhat inextricable, especially with regards to organized crime in the United States, where politics and the Mafia have tended to be financial bedfellows but less associated with the exact same actors, especially among the working class.

Ferrante’s novels’ immersion in Italy—in particular Naples, and more specifically one poor, dialect-infused neighborhood in the city—is crucial to the understanding of how intensely personal readers’ responses to Ferrante have tended to be. Because although I am Italian American and grew up below the poverty line in a neighborhood quite similar to Lenu’s and Lila’s, that fact—or any other biographical fact—seems irrelevant when considering that almost every woman reader gripped by so-called “Ferrante fever” seems to feel similarly: as though these books were written for her, to her, revealing the insides of her own messy guts and brain. As Claire Messud wrote in an email to Meghan O’Rourke, when O’Rourke was writing about Ferrante for The Guardian, “When you write to me and say you love her work, I have a moment where I think, ‘But … Elena is my friend! My private relationship with her, so intense and so true, is one that nobody else can fully know!’” To love Ferrante, especially in the days prior to her work being widely made into television series, was almost akin to a secret handshake in certain bookish, feminist circles. Yet it is fair to extrapolate that most of her avid American fans had upbringings radically different from Lenu’s and Lila’s in Naples. What readers relate to most are her characters’ fearlessly naked, almost unfathomably nuanced interior lives and relationships. You don’t have to be Italian, or poor, or have a “getting out” story, or to have known anyone in organized crime, to feel that Ferrante’s novels cut closer to the bone than other works of fiction.

The exception to this, in my old neighborhood and in the city of Chicago in general, especially in that era, was the role “Aldermen” played in neighborhood politics. Make no mistake: someone would need to have just arrived from Mars to make the argument that Chicago politics were not largely intertwined with organized crime, and it was the norm in my neighborhood and many others for most locals to vote in elections the way the Alderman instructed them to do, and common colloquial knowledge that many Aldermen had connections with organized crime. But as I was only a child and—like Lenu—left my old neighborhood for college, and unlike Lenu, although I returned to Chicago eventually as she does to Naples, I never again lived in the confines of my old neighborhood, so I cannot pretend to be as knowledgeable about the inner workings of the Chicago political machine as it intersected with the so-called Chicago Outfit. This being said, it is certainly true that exactly zero teens I ever knew in my old neighborhood were obsessed with large ideological concepts such as Communism, Fascism, or for that matter Democracy, so where politics and organized crime—and possibly gangs—intersected seems to have been the terrain of adults.