The Lying Life of Adults

by Elena Ferrante

who was already suffering because both my parents were suddenly unhappy with me, and that unhappiness distressed me, tarnishing everything?

“It happens to me, too. When I’m anxious I turn ugly, but then it goes away.”

Maybe at that moment something somewhere in my body broke, maybe that’s where I should locate the end of my childhood.

Sun, heat, rain, wind, cold, and I who was walking and walking, through countless dangers, until I met my own future as an ugly, faithless woman.

I had her every word in my head, every gesture, every expression of her face, and they didn’t seem things that had just happened, it all seemed to be still happening.

you don’t belong only to your father and mother, you’re mine, too, you belong to the whole family that he came from, and anyone who belongs to us is never alone, is charged with energy.

he didn’t want to see them dead so he wouldn’t have to feel that he, too, would die.

What truly counted was the capacity to inspire love, even if one was ugly, even if spiteful, even if stupid.

I’ve talked about Enzo, and whenever I talk about him I don’t remember only the grief, but also how happy we were.”

So I now felt colorless to my parents, colorless to Vittoria, not showing a truthful face to my friends.

We two are made like that, when we have good thoughts we’re pretty, but we turn ugly with mean ones, we have to get them out of our heads.

I could no longer be innocent, behind my thoughts there were other thoughts, childhood was over.

absence of clear boundaries,

dissolving boundaries!

looked for meanings to get around that impression of scant intelligence in people who had so much of it.

Lies, lies, adults forbid them and yet they tell so many.

How is it possible, I said to myself, that boys are so stupid, how is it possible that those two, if I merely touch them, if I simply let them touch me, go blind, they don’t see and don’t feel the disgust I feel for myself.

I began to think of him as of the silhouette of a very distant mountain, a bluish substance contained within heavy lines. Probably—I said to myself—no one in Pascone has ever seen him with the clarity I was capable of there in the church.

“I feel ugly, like I’m a bad person, and yet I’d like to be loved.”

wanted to love like that, too, but not a man who didn’t deserve it.

how rough men were, how brutal in every word they dedicated to love.

I couldn’t bear to seem like a girl who’s ugly and won’t admit it.

“Very true. If you like something, I always make myself like it.”

Elena and Lila core!

She wanted to end it with Tonino but not with Giuliana, whom she was fond of;

gay

The wish that there could be a friendship between Roberto and me was miraculously coming true, so that I seemed to be guided and instructed by him, in a way that my father, too absorbed in himself and his misdeeds, had never known how to do.

daddy issues

How wonderful to travel, how wonderful to know someone who knows everything, whose intelligence and looks and kindness are extraordinary, and who explains to you the value of what by yourself you wouldn’t be able to appreciate.

I wished that from that moment he—only he—would point out to me what I wasn’t and what I was.

fleabag core

Having him inside me would have been easy, he would have penetrated me even now, in sleep, without surprise. He was convinced that I had returned for that type of betrayal and not for betrayals that were much more ferocious.

“It’s cute,” I said.