The Story of a New Name

In the spring of 1966, Lila entrusts Elena, the first-person narrator, with a metal box of eight notebooks, which she can no longer keep at home for fear that her husband will read them. Though Lila ties the box with an excessive amount of string and makes Elena swear that she will never open it, Elena breaks her promise. In Lila’s notebooks, Elena reads “detailed accounts of the events of her life” and the neighborhood in which she and Lila grew up (15). The notebooks cover the events of My Brilliant Friend, the first book in Ferrante’s quartet, from Lila’s perspective. They describe Lila’s sadness, as a child, when Maestra Oliviero ignored her story, The Blue Fairy and when Elena abandoned her to go to middle school. They describe how proud she was when she made her first pair of shoes and became “a rich and elegant lady” on the arm of her fiancé, Stefano Carracci, who out of his love for her, helped expand the family shoemaking business (17). Finally, they culminate in Lila’s horror that her hated former suitor, Marcello Solara, turned up to her wedding, wearing the handmade shoes her husband “had said were so dear to him” (17).