BEDSIDE TABLE
“ I HAVE always been desperate for more stories with female protagonists who tell us about the internal experience of being a woman. We have plenty of books with complicated male protagonists, and most women I know grew up inding a way to identify with them. If you read Greek mythology, who’s more interesting, Odysseus or the wife who’s waiting for him? Women have a lot of experience projecting ourselves onto male protagonists, and it’s such a thrill when we get really ine literature about a female character.
So Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet shook me. It was thrilling to read a female protagonist who is lawed, who is ambitious, who is intellectual and sexual. It’s the full range of human experience told through incredibly precise, sometimes rageful language.