The Lying Life of Adults

Publication and form

Elena Ferrante’s The Lying Life of Adults is a work of literary fiction and a coming-of-age novel set in Naples. First published in Italian in 2019, it appeared in English in 2020 in Ann Goldstein’s translation. By then Ferrante was internationally known for the Neapolitan quartet, but this novel is a separate story, with a new narrator and a distinct period of adolescence at its center. It continues her sustained interest in women’s lives, family bonds, social divisions, and the unstable boundary between what people say and what they know.

Story

Giovanna, the novel’s first-person narrator, looks back on her adolescence in 1990s Naples. At thirteen, she overhears her father, Andrea, compare her to his estranged sister, Vittoria. The remark unsettles Giovanna’s understanding of herself and of the apparently secure family life around her. She becomes newly conscious of her changing body and begins to question the stories her parents have told about their family. Wanting to learn who her aunt really is, Giovanna seeks Vittoria out, crossing the social and geographical distance between different parts of the city.

Vittoria’s recollections and grievances reveal a history of family conflict that Giovanna’s parents have not presented in the same way. As she moves among relatives, friends, and first romantic attachments, Giovanna tries to understand whom she can trust and what sort of person she is becoming. The novel follows her from roughly thirteen to sixteen, through physical change, embarrassment, desire, jealousy, and the effort to claim independence. Growing up is not presented as a steady passage toward certainty: Giovanna’s account is shaped by partial knowledge, conflicting memories, and her own shifting interpretations.

Themes and significance

The “lies” of the title include deliberate deception, but also the silences and distortions through which families protect their reputations and preserve their preferred versions of the past. Adults do not emerge as reliable authorities simply because they are older; they, too, are moved by fear, desire, resentment, and self-interest. Giovanna’s developing body becomes a central site of uncertainty. It can feel unfamiliar or shameful, yet also powerful and provocative. Through her experience, Ferrante examines how a young woman forms an identity under the pressure of other people’s judgments, gender expectations, and her own emerging desires.

Naples is more than a setting. Giovanna’s movement between different parts of the city makes social divisions tangible, exposing contrasting material circumstances, habits, and ways of speaking. Ferrante’s close first-person narration places the adult narrator’s act of looking back beside the adolescent’s immediate confusion. The prose is attentive to emotional shifts, allowing curiosity, attachment, anger, and shame to coexist rather than resolving them into a simple lesson. The novel does not offer a neat account of growing up or an uncomplicated division between good and evil; it asks how anyone can distinguish fact from family story when memory and self-interest shape both.

Written after the international success of the Neapolitan novels, The Lying Life of Adults broadened Ferrante’s readership while standing on its own. It became a bestseller and appeared on several publications’ best-of-2020 lists. Its reception reflects the larger place Ferrante has secured in contemporary literature: readers across languages have been drawn to her unsentimental treatment of women’s experience, intimate relationships, and social history. Her use of a pseudonym has also kept attention focused on the work and on the questions it raises about authorship, public identity, and whose accounts of a life are believed.