The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante

Ferrante renders the physical and emotional turmoil of adolescence in brilliant, moving detail; again she has produced a masterpiece.

For many of us, puberty was the time when our parents were no longer gods to us, but mere mortals – and then, perhaps, demons.
The narrator Giovanna is an innocent child, content in the comfortable life she shares with her mother and father.
Giovanna’s coming of age is triggered by an offhanded remark of her father, that Giovanna resembles his sister Vittoria, whom he hates and from whom he is estranged. The harsh words shatter Giovanna’s sense of safety and mental stability. Her father, and men in general, have “enormous authority” over her sense of her own beauty and value.

As the hormones start churning and her self-consciousness grows, Giovanna investigates her parent’s lives more closely, seeking out her forbidden Aunt Vittoria while traversing the neighborhoods of Naples – rich, poor, religious, atheist, passionate and frigid – and finding herself increasingly disgusted by the mounting evidence that adults are untrustworthy, hypocritical, and governed mainly by emotional whims.

No longer able to worship her father as the god of her idolatry, Giovanna fills the space he vacated with an infatuation with another, unavailable man. (A habit of teenage girls capitalized on by boy bands everywhere.)

It is impossible to read this book and not remember what it felt like to be an awkward, confused, hormonal teenager, trapped in a body you are convinced is betraying you with its every natural function and full of self-righteous anger over the hypocrisy of adults.

It is uniquely disgusting when a parent behaves selfishly towards a child, and Ferrante does not let the adults off the hook. But the reader is also aware that Giovanna has not lived long enough to have a fully cultivated compassion towards the mistakes of others – in other words, she has not yet lowered her expectations for humanity down to realistic levels.