"Now I know what an absence of sense is and what happens if you manage to get back to the surface of it. You, you don't know. At most, you glanced down, you got frightened, and you plugged up the hole"

a story that we've all heard from the women in our lives ad infinitum, but one that is no less painful and frustrating for it's commonality. everyone swears that they won't become la poverella, and yet, without fail, so many do, left to toil in mental anguish while their carbon copy husbands move worry-free through life, chasing pleasure and discarding any impediment

i think what set the days of abandonment apart for me was how unnerving the middle section was. olga, our mc, speaks at one point on how she loves "the writers who made you look through every line, to gaze downward and feel the vertigo of the depths, the blackness of inferno," and i think elena ferrante did this exceptionally well with the hardest day of olga's separation