In 'The Lying Life of Adults,' a teenage girl goes searching for someone to believe in.
Claire FallonWhen Giovanna Trada is a teenager, she suddenly falls in love with a devout man named Roberto, a religious scholar she sees speaking at Mass. Raised by secular intellectuals, she has never been baptized and knows no prayers, but, enraptured by her new beloved’s faith, she decides to read the Gospels.
When the novel begins, Giovanna is leaving her charmed childhood. She’s accustomed to being the apple of her father’s eye and her mother’s deepest interest, but her parents are also happily married and ever-performing the story of their own romance for her. Both educated, attractive teachers, Nella also edits romance novels while Andrea is a minor leftist intellectual.
Giovanna’s parents try to reassure her that “the face of Vittoria” is just a gentle inside joke between them, a reminder of how far they’ve come from their rough beginnings, but she is unappeased. They also worry, correctly, that Vittoria’s spiteful tales about them will drive a wedge between them and their impressionable daughter."The Lying Life of Adults"
For the first time, Giovanna must grapple with competing narratives ― not just her parents versus her aunt, but what her parents tell her directly versus the harsh words she’s overheard from them. Andrea and Nella have always urged their daughter to be devoted to her books. Vittoria also believes in study; she instructs Giovanna to pay close attention to other people, especially her parents, to see the way things really are.
She turns to her dazzlingly fierce aunt as a new authority but then begins to question her as well, disappointed by a hidden sentimental side that emerges. “Maybe I should have observed my aunt with the same attention with which she had urged me to spy on my parents,” she thinks, so that she would have observed that “behind the harshness that had charmed me there was a soft, foolish little woman” with “the ugliness of banality.
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