The Calamitous Lies of Adulthood

In Elena Ferrante’s The Lying Life of Adults, the narrator—an adolescent girl named Giovanna—begins her story by recounting the time she heard her father tell her mother “that I was very ugly.” This statement is technically untrue, and an introduction to the novel’s tricky manipulations. What she actually overhears her father say is that she’s “getting the face of Vittoria,” his estranged sister.