The Lying Life of Adults

“Vittoria seemed to me to have a beauty so unbearable that to consider her ugly became a necessity.” 

Giovanna wants to see her aunt to determine if they look alike. When she thinks her aunt is beautiful, Giovanna is afraid because her aunt symbolizes evil, meaning Giovanna is aligning herself more and more with someone she and her parents perceive as corruption incarnate. 

“Your father erases everything that might be better than him, […] He can become by instinct a person you can no longer live without.” 

Aunt Vittoria says this of her brother Andrea. The quote continues the theme of mythic good and evil in the narrative. Giovanna thinks her father is refined and can do no wrong, yet she must now grapple with him possibly being instinctually deceitful. Once she affirms this, she spends the rest of the novel trying to break free from what she considers his charm or bewitchment.

“She pushed me away forcefully, and, suddenly deprived of her warmth, I muffled a cry, as if I’d felt a sharp pain somewhere but was ashamed to show myself weak.” 

Despite having a happy childhood, Giovanna’s family doesn’t show much emotion. Giovanna feels so deprived of emotional love that she equates separating from her aunt’s hug with a physical blow: Her inward pain and confusion manifest here as a physical ailment.

“The bond with known spaces, with secure affections, yielded to curiosity about what might happen.” 

Giovanna says this about hurting her parents by lying to them and then going off with Aunt Vittoria. Amazed at how easy it is to forget feeling bad, Giovanna sees leaving her family home and its refined morals as a battle between the known and the unknown. Adolescence means welcoming the fearful unknown despite the possible consequences.

“Sometimes I felt that if they stopped hating each other I would do something to make them start again.” 

Giovanna once thought that her budding relationship with her aunt might bridge the gap between the aunt and Giovanna’s parents. Now, however, Giovanna wants her aunt’s affection all to herself. Once fearful of her aunt’s selfish and cruel nature, Giovanna now embraces it as her own. She is embracing the person she once feared becoming.

“[…] I began to think that the name assigned to me by Vittoria has miraculously brought forth from my same body another person, more pleasant or anyway different from the Giovanna by which I was known to my parents […].” 

One recurring motif in the novel is that people aren’t always who they seem to be. The characters contain different personalities, and these personalities often conflict with the surface persona. Giovanna, too, feels like the person she was prior to meeting Aunt Vittoria is an entirely different person than the adolescent girl Aunt Vittoria is coaxing out of her. The novel’s central conflict addresses the struggle between these two selves.

“Especially with Ida, and almost without realizing it, I came close to giving the two women the capacity to fly through night skies or invent magic potions as they gathered enchanted herbs in the Capodimonte woods.”

Giovanna takes offense to the adults in her life always lying to her. Yet she begins lying to Ida and Angela to make her own life sound better than it is. Her hypocrisy merges with her overactive imagination and love of myths, so that Aunt Vittoria becomes a supernatural person with powers, an “aunt-witch.” This quote also underscores the importance of stories in shaping belief.

“So I now felt colorless to my parents, colorless to Vittoria, not showing a truthful face to my friends.” 

Giovanna later defines her adolescence as a group of colorful images interspersed with gray ones. Here, she feels that she is bland and unimportant to those closest to her. The “truthful face” differs from the lying face she’s embraced. It defines being two-faced, or a liar. The face remark also highlights Giovanna’s obsession with physical ugliness as a sign of inner ugliness (evil).

“What are you doing, Angela asked, and she lay down cautiously, gently, on top of me, saying: until a little while ago we fit perfectly and now, look, you’re longer than me.” 

This quote marks a series of changes for Giovanna. She and Angela used to practice kissing with one another. They also engaged in romantic and sexual activities together. This quote happens right before Giovanna’s father’s affair comes to light. When Giovanna rebels because of this affair, her sexual attention turns to boys instead. Her body’s length being different than Angela’s underscores the break of their union (friendship), Giovanna’s growing pains, and Giovanna’s growth into new areas of adolescent exploration.

“Until that moment I had been sure that my mother belonged to me and that my right to have her always available was indisputable.”

Despite wanting to grow up, Giovanna retains a childlike perspective early in the novel. Here, she views her mother’s love as an absolute, objectifying both her mother and her mother’s love as something that would always “belong” to her. Giovanna will eventually abandon viewing and demanding love as a sacred right altogether.

“But the laugh wouldn’t be erased, it changed into a frozen smile, I felt it on my face and couldn’t get rid of it.” 

Giovanna earlier defends Rosario’s misshapen teeth by telling her aunt he only looks like he’s laughing: He really means no harm. Here, however, Giovanna’s face becomes the face of Aunt Vittoria, the face of cruelty, as she purposely and voluntarily berates her father and enjoys it. The smile doesn’t stay because of a physical issue but because of an internal willingness to hurt.

“Eventually, I also decided to separate from her bracelet. […] But, whenever I remembered it my stomach hurt, I broke into a sweat, I had thoughts that wouldn’t go away.” 

Giovanna sometimes equates emotional reactions to Aunt Vittoria with physical ailments. Earlier she felt a sharp pain when Aunt Vittoria stopped hugging her. Here, even the thought of Aunt Vittoria’s bracelet causes pain in her stomach. It is as if her aunt’s absence creates a painful presence, a pain that can only be remedied by keeping her aunt or her aunt’s bracelet in close proximity. This also correlates with her feeling of being bewitched.

“The return to childish fairy tales just as I felt I was truly emerging from childhood had for a while the advantage of reducing to the minimum not only my father’s responsibility but mine, too.” 

Giovanna admits to herself that she misses the innocence of childhood back when her parents ordered her life and Giovanna blindly obeyed. Fairytales and childhood operate on fate and magic here so that responsibility is out of one’s control. In this magical world, even Giovanna’s hurtful father might be forgiven his trespasses. Giovanna will ultimately reject this childhood innocence and reject the notion of an innocent father figure.

“But now, increasingly, a bitter sarcasm alternated with a quiet cult of memory.”

Giovanna witnesses her mother’s anger and hurt from Andrea’s affair turn into nostalgia. Her mother begins making excuses for the man who hurt her. Giovanna is still grappling with whether love can be absolute: Should she hate her father absolutely? Should she hate her mother’s absolute love for Andrea? Giovanna also despises how men like Andrea and Enzo can foster “cults of memory” in their absence despite the horrible things they did in their presence.

“Maybe I should have observed my aunt with the same attention with which she had urged me to spy on my parents.” 

During their first meeting, Aunt Vittoria instructed Giovanna to spy on her parents by watching them closely. Now, Giovanna thinks that she should apply the same method to Aunt Vittoria herself because her aunt is acting strange. Aunt Vittoria appears like a frightened, tender woman inside, and Giovanna’s concept of tough love can’t align itself with Aunt Vittoria really being vulnerable and boring underneath her gritty exterior.

“They had been waiting for me, patiently hiding somewhere or other, all the time imagining that I would satisfy their every desire. I looked at them with sympathy, they seemed tenderly insignificant as they went by in the wind.” 

Giovanna decides not to hang out with Rosario and Corrado. She knows they only want sexual favors from her. In this moment, especially after seeing a different type of love in Roberto, Giovanna sees that she can be a different person, while also discerning a central truth of the novel: The men in her life use sex as a distraction, thereby objectifying women like Giovanna. Giovanna sees these men—boys, really—as unimportant in the grand scheme of things.

“Was it possible that I had taken for weakness the strength—yes, the strength—of her way of loving absolutely?” 

When Giovanna determines to be a better person, she immediately sees her mother in a more positive light and realizes her mother has always been loving. In fact, Giovanna now sees her mother’s love for Andrea as even more loving and longsuffering than Aunt Vittoria’s love for Enzo. Giovanna admits that she previously assessed her mother’s love unfavorably and unfairly because of her insistence on idolizing Aunt Vittoria’s love.

“I learned […] that it was impossible to stop growing up. […] As for my face, it had no harmony, just like Vittoria’s. But the mistake had been to make it a tragedy.” 

Giovanna learns two important lessons here: She will always grow up, and her physical appearance doesn’t determine her personality. Giovanna thinks that growing up equates to suffering tinged with lying. She has learned to lie and to pretend. Despite this, she also understands that a beautiful face like her mother’s can hide pain and suffering and deceit just as easily as a supposedly ugly face.

“That morning something suddenly occurred to me that seemed intolerable and yet funny: neither Vittoria nor my father nor I could cut out our common roots, and so, depending on the situation, it was always ourselves we ended up loving or hating.”

While studying her father and aunt, Giovanna sees similar traits that she too embodies. Though angry, she ultimately accepts that the three of them like to see themselves in others, yet they hate seeing vices in others. For instance, Giovanna despises seeing her father in Aunt Vittoria. Aunt Vittoria hates seeing Andrea in Giovanna. Andrea hates seeing Aunt Vittoria in Giovanna.

“When her face seemed to be utterly drained of life, a harsh, aggressive voice came out, with a strong dialectical coloring […].” 

As the group listens to Michela speak, Giovanna takes note of Giuliana’s face. To Giovanna, Giuliana’s jealousy is so intense that it alters her physical features and withers her face like a disease. This description symbolizes how inward struggles and silent grievances, which many people have in the novel, eat away at characters from the inside out until characters react violently.

“But the phrase—you’re very beautiful—wouldn’t leave my mind: what a jolt to the heart it had been. […] they seemed to me the secret magic formula of a resurrection […].” 

Giovanna has been trying to determine if she loves Roberto as a mentor or a romantic interest. When he suddenly calls her beautiful, Giovanna’s world upends. She likens the words to a magic formula and a resurrection, suggesting that she’s once again stepping into the illogical space of childhood fantasy. Yet she also equates Roberto with a Christlike figure by saying he resurrected her. Roberto’s words set up the novel’s climax and the resolution that follows.

“But whatever I had dreamed had vanished, leaving only the impression that my hair was coming out in clumps, more than Giuliana’s, not my real hair but the hair my father had praised when I was a child.” 

Giuliana’s hair begins falling out due to stress. She has a physical reaction to a mental action. Here, Giovanna also feels her hair is falling out, yet the hair is the hair she once idolized in her childhood. Giovanna loved when her father praised her hair. Her hair symbolizes vanity, perfection, refinement, and praise related to the male gaze. Imagining it falling out means that she is breaking with her childhood self. It also suggests that she is guilty about embracing her inner cruelty: She is on her way to betray Giuliana by sleeping with Roberto, thus abandoning any pretense of childhood innocence.

“A few seconds passed, he was standing, looking at me from above, sympathetically, I was on the couch, staring at him from below, confused.” 

Giovanna’s dream comes true: Roberto is willing to have sex with her. Yet as soon as she realizes this, she no longer wants to have sex with him. She sees him now as a father figure, like her own father and like the God of the Gospels, a confusing male figure staring down at her with an authoritative, patronizing kindness. She is but a mere distraction to this type of “love.”