violent wombs

in hazy Italy, as a woman struggles to translate a novel

Fiction, 2002

I read The Days of Abandonment mostly in the backyard. It was the early winter of 2022 and I was just so sad. Classes had shifted back online because of a new COVID wave and I would spend the ten minutes between logging onto Zoom (again) with the novel. It was also during this period that I started smoking cigarettes, and even now, every time I’m home in the garden, I think of the characters in the novel, the friend that I was annotating the book for, and how nice it feels to know you have moved beyond a period of life.

We follow Olga, a mother of two, whose husband has suddenly told her that he no longer wants to be together. She is confused, devastated, and finally, numb. Her children blame her, she blames herself, and at one point, she looks into the mirror and cannot recognise the face and body that stare back at her. The Days of Abandonment is slim, the characters are few, but the intensity is high. It’s hard to talk about the book without imposing yourself on it. Still, for me, it was about how unfairly daughters see mothers, and how painful it must be for the latter to know that their child will never truly see them as a person beyond the parental relation. It works vice-versa.

Ferrante’s writing is stunning, and because this is my newsletter where I can do whatever I want, two things deeply annoy me about the discourse on her work: 1. People’s obsession with uncovering her true identity (Ferrante is a pen name, leave her alone!) 2. The tagline that she gets of writing the best female friendships in literature (she does so much more and this is an unfair and limiting categorisation). I hope this book lifts you up as it did for me.

Film - August: Osage County

Song - Velvet Ring - Big Thief