Lying begins with simple things: ‘did YOU make that mess?’. It soon skips to white lies ‘you don’t look a day past 20’, to lies told to make answering questions easier, to the lies we tell ourselves.
Ferrante’s work sweeps across the spectrum of lying, but I think it most focuses on that last one: the lies we use to support our fiction and make life bearable. We are so good at tricking ourselves, but viewed from the perspective of a child as in ‘The Lying Life of Adults’, such lies - repeated - strike differently. Giovanna’s father, mother, aunt, friends all lie to themselves about the nature of their relationships, attractions and intentions. But lies are fragile things and as they unwind
Giovanna is jarringly brought into the implied world.
The novel opens hard, as Giovanna hears her father call her ugly. But I think it’s the repeated lies telling her that she’s loved, by sleazy suitors and her family alike, that continue pressing. I love how we get to follow her into this secondary, fragile world of lies.