Yes, You Should Love It All
Ferrante fever
The Sunday Letter #3
This week, I’ve been reading My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante.
I’ve read Ferrante’s shorter work (I wrote about Maggie Gyllenhaal’s film version The Lost Daughter by Ferrante here), but I’ve long been too intimidated to start the four-part Neapolitan novels, first released in 2011. I was glad when my book club pal Jess (this week’s Word of Mouth guest) suggested that we read the first one, My Brilliant Friend, so I finally had the motivation to pick it up and enjoy it with friends. I’m only a third of the way through, but so far, My Brilliant Friend is a completely different experience from Ferrante’s earlier, and shorter, work.
Typically, Ferrante’s narrators are older women, often in the midst of an emotional crisis due to loneliness and/or general instability. Despite their infamously saccharine covers, Ferrante’s novels are dark and brutally honest portrayals of marriage, motherhood, class, and gender. My Brilliant Friend, the first in the Neapolitan series, begins with an older woman discovering that her estranged best friend has gone missing, and then sharing the story of their childhood and early adulthood together.
Themes of innocence and childhood naïveté are thoughtfully intertwined with an adult’s cynical disposition as she recounts the violent fever dream that was their shared childhood in 1950’s Italy. Have you read the series? What did you think?
This week’s recommendations
Last week’s recap was about a Greta Gerwig double-feature, which I’m repeating this week with a different leading woman: Aubrey Plaza in Ingrid Goes West and Black Bear. One was slightly underwhelming and the other is still stuck with me. Read on for which is which…
Ingrid Goes West (dir. Matt Spicer, 2017)
Sometimes I’ll hear a joke that reminds me of you, and I’ll feel sad because I have no way of telling you about it.
Aubrey Plaza plays a grieving, distraught social climber in a 3 Women-esque reflection on identity and the aesthetics of social media. Dare I say Aubrey Plaza is kind of underrated as an actress, even with the giant career boom she’s having from season 2 of White Lotus? She can lift subpar writing and dialogue and stick a dagger into your heart even when you’re still kinda rooting against her for doing despicable things to a first-edition Joan Didion. A decent film, but less layered than Plaza’s 2020 twisty black comedy/drama…
Black Bear (dir. Lawrence Michael Levine, 2020)
Allison: It’s not like I have any really big ideas or anything, when I’m making something.
Blair: How can you make something if you don’t have anything to say?
This is a slithery kind of film, the kind that sheds its skin as it moves along in order to become something completely different by the time it ends. I’d avoid spoilers for this one so that it can really sink its teeth into you. What I can tell you: Plaza plays a mysterious writer with a murky past who retreats to the woods, and chaos ensues. Despite some (intentionally?) overdrawn dialogue, this one stuck with me, especially due to Plaza’s elusive charm.
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George Saunders shares a short meditation on rejection:
This is the great gift that rejection affords us: it drives us down into a place of deeper and sometimes uncomfortable honesty about what we've done.
Abject women from Ephemeras:
Being an abject woman isn’t about just being down bad; it’s also more desperate, filthier, more transgressive, about blood and fluids and the potential to be filled up in all kinds of ways.
A favourite to re-read: Céline Sciamma’s quest for a new, feminist grammar of cinema, written by the luminous Elif Batuman.
What if the thing you’ve been weighing against “life” is itself life? What if it’s all one thing, and not a bunch of trade-offs? “I’m not saying that you have to love it all,” Sciamma said. “But, yes, you should love it all.”
New word of the week: pentimento” (pen·ti·men·to) — noun — A visible trace of earlier painting beneath a layer(s) of paint on a canvas.