How do we process the loss of love? It is the question Ferrante's protagonist, Olga, is living after her husband abruptly leaves her one day at lunch. Over the course of an ordinary day, an ordinary meal, he announces that everything is over and he is leaving for good.

This is the first blow. The second comes later, when she discovers he has run away with a twenty-year-old woman that they have known since she was a teenager. The implications of this on top of the infidelity send Olga into a tailspin. She experiences a form of emotional break that presents itself as a mental incapacity for reasonable thought.

The story is told in a very stream of consciousness narrative, that slips between the present day--where Olga's son is sick, the dog has been poisoned, and she has unwittingly locked them inside the apartment with no working phone--and her speculations on her husband's new life.

This is the worst day, but throughout the "days of abandonment" we see a raw and broken version of Olga, whose confusion and hurt manifest as anger. It is a portrait of a woman who has subsumed her life for the career and dreams of her husband, and when he leaves, has no foundation on which to stand--or feel or even think. It is an extreme, but it is no less true for that.

The meditation Ferrante presents on performance of feminity, gender roles, and relationships is a reminder that, even today, we conflate love with self. That women like Olga are raised on the belief that your relationship is what defines you, makes you a complete person. Only to discover that, once you are abandoned, you are only half a person.