Guest Post: On Reading Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels by Emme Lund

A banner image of the covers of the Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartest published by Europa editions.

On Reading Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels

There are some things I started before I came out and then finished after I began my transition. The Wire. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Octavia Butler’s unfinished Earthseed Trilogy. I spent four years making my way through the Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante and I can remember where I was every time I read a book from the series. Two months ago I finished the series.

I read My Brilliant Friend poolside in Palm Springs on vacation with friends. I sun tanned naked by the pool in February. A grapefruit tree stretched out over the water and we would swim up, pluck a grapefruit and squeeze the fresh juice over our tequila. Ferrante wrote about Lenú and Lila’s friendship in such a way that I couldn’t put the book down. Two women caught in a violent neighborhood in a violent world and there was a part of me somewhere that identified with the two young girls. I was caught in Ferrante’s net.

            The next year I read Bolaño’s 2666, and the book’s violence against women fucked me up for weeks. I needed a palate cleanser, so I decided to pick up Ferrante’s second book, The Story of a New Name. I had forgotten about the violence in the series, time granting me a rosier picture of the duo’s lives. I was in Las Vegas with coworkers and again, read much of the book next to a pool in winter. (I do not spend a lot of time on vacation, nor do I find myself poolside very often.) I was feeling different at this point. I had been sober for five months so I spent much of the vacation watching my friends get drunk until 7 am in casinos and then going to bed for a few hours. The book granted me space when I struggled with not drinking. It was around this time that I knew that there was something else deep down that I was not addressing, something that the clarity of sobriety and weekly therapy sessions were bringing more and more to the surface.

            And again, another year before I read the next book. It was November 2018 when the thought popped into my head, that I was not a man, that I was, in fact, a woman. I felt great relief in the knowing, but it also brought bouts of depression and dysphoria. I spent lots of anxious nights wondering if I should start hormones or if it was too late for me. I picked up Those who Leave and Those who Stay in January. At this point the book granted me the gift of spending time with women, of being immersed in a life entirely unlike mine, but also not so different. I, like every single one of us, experienced imposter syndrome like Lenú. I felt a deep kinship with the women in the book and such a distance from the men (something I always felt but it was certainly amplified at this time).

            I started HRT in May, and by that time I had come out to most of my friends but was still in the closet at work and with family. I brought The Story of a Lost Child to Mexico to read poolside on vacation but ended up reading Nabokov’s King, Queen, Knave instead. Ferrante flew to Mexico and back without me cracking the spine.

            By the time I picked up the fourth and final book for real, it was November and I was out to the world. I finished the book quietly in bed, my partner and our pug sleeping quietly next to me (as quietly as pugs can sleep anyways.) Like many things, the book ended softly, like it had barely happened at all. I was two years sober, on hormones for five months, and a completely different person then when I had started the series. Half my body’s cells had been replaced. Four years had passed for me, and seventy for Lenú and Lila, and we all seemed to have lived lifetimes. And what about that is not true? What about that is not how it feels to live and love and grow apart?

Find out more about Emme Lund at her website.