Status Updates From The Lying Life of Adults

finished: Chapter 4 (pages 129-174)

Enter.. teenage hormones and family troubles.

Quotes

Page 152
"Maybe everything would be less complicated if you told the truth."
(...) Lies, Lies, adults forbid them yet they tell so many.

Page 163
"A very violent need for degradation was growing inside me --a fearless degradation, a yearning to feel heroically vile (...)"

Page 173 - spell undone
"(...) If Vitorria really is that, I thought discouraged, then she is ugly, she has the ugliness of banality."

me when a teenager acts like a teenager in a book that is written from the POV of a teenager 😡😡😡😡 (I'll repent)

"P138
"(...), now that I was grown up, now that I was no longer a puppet, I didn't feel I had a talent for anything: I wasn't intelligent, I wasn't capable of good intentions, I wasn't pretty, I wasn't even nice."

P138 - her parents decided to keep her repeating a grade a secret:
"(...) I felt even more humiliated. I discovered that I wanted people to know that failure, after all, was my only mark of distinction."

finished: Chapter 3 (pages 101-126)


Page 117 - about Aunt V
"Her capacity for affection must long ago been used up, probably with the death of Enzo, but her capacity for hatred -- it seemed to me -- had no limit."

Quotes from Chapter 3

Page 113 - at the church's flea market
"(...) Cups, books, a coffeepot, all well worn objects, touched over the years by hands that by now were probably hands of the dead, poverty being sold to poverty."

Page 113 - How Aunt V is perceived by the community
"Certainly it surprised me that they associated my aunt, who was unmarried, with both widowhood and entertainment."

After Aunt V told Giovanna to really "look" at her family

Page 102+103 -- Quote Part 2
"(...) But who would assure me that, just as I erupted into tears, I wouldn't fling in her face her responsibility, wouldn't yell with all the fury I was capable of that yes, I had done as she told me, I had looked exactly as she had told me to look, and now knew that I shouldn't have, (...)"

after Aunt V told Giovanna to take a good look at what her parents are really like.
(Aunt V needs some non romanticized looking at as well tbqh..but that's for another day..)

Page 102 - Quote Part 1
"(...) Only with my aunt would I be able to weep in complete freedom, screaming, sobbing. Oh yes, I wanted a moment of release, no words, no confidences, only an expulsion of suffering. (...)

finished: Chapter 2 (pages 49-97)

If the author doesn't write a full on lesbian novel before she taps out of the writing game...is2g... LIKE IT GETS TO A POINT?!.... IN EVERY BOOK!!!! MULTIPLE TIMES!! the bonds, the queer subtext (and here the experimenting)!!!!

I and an extended bathtub session with the good fragrances and a book as per ushhh

Page 85 - meeting ...family friends.. (for lack of a better word) of Aunt V's
"Were those three young people in some way her blood, too, and therefore mine? I liked Tonino, Giuliana, Corrado, I also liked Margherita. What a pity to be the last to arrive, not to speak the language they spoke, not to have true intimacy."

P69
"How I liked that bond that had never been broken(..) If Enzo was an ugly man, well, his ugliness suddenly moved me, or rather the word lost meaning, dissolved in the gurgle of the water. What truly counted was the capacity to inspire love, even if one was ugly, even if spiteful, even if stupid. I felt there was some grandeur in that, and hoped that, whatever face was coming to me, I would have that capacity(..)"

...A bit tired of the constant commenting on looks being used as a narrative element.....
I understand that's how the story started, "my father said I was very ugly," and that it helps keep it cohesive. I know our main character is a teenager, and that it's more often that Roald Dahl bit (a life lived like X shows physically) than a direct comment on looks, but it's starting to give ✨physiognomy✨ regardless....

I’ll fall in love with women written by Ferrante a million times more