The Lying Life of Adults

Throughout history, women have been—and continue to be—demonized or sanctified based on life choices and/or events out of their control. The Virgin Mary, for instance, symbolizes virtue, while Eve is a sinner. Joan of Arc began as a saint but was later martyred as a sinner. In The Lying Life of Adults, Aunt Vittoria and Costanza face branding as sinners, while Nella and Giuliana are saints. Giovanna ultimately pushes back against the historical, archetypal roles of women as either sinners or saints, but it takes her a while to change her thinking. The progression of her thoughts is important in understanding how society often shapes the discourse on women and female empowerment.

When the narrative begins, 13-year-old Giovanna views life the same way her parents do. She believes girls and women should be refined and well-dressed. She also believes women like Aunt Vittoria are evil. Giovanna even likens her aunt to a witch several times throughout the novel. When her mother later tells her about Aunt Vittoria’s affair with a married man, Enzo, Giovanna also views her aunt as manipulative and adulterous. This assessment of Aunt Vittoria contrasts with Giovanna’s mother, Nella, who is a foil for Aunt Vittoria. Nella is virtuous, womanly, refined. Later, however, Giovanna embraces the “sinful” world she once despised. Aunt Vittoria foreshadows much of Giovanna’s rebellious choices, saying, “You see I’m right […] you’re intelligent, an intelligent little slut like me […] you act like a saint but you like turning the knife in the wound” (73). Much of Giovanna’s struggle in the text is determining what archetype she will follow: her mother’s saintliness or her aunt’s “sinful” nature.

Costanza is another character who vacillates from one extreme to the other. She has a Joan of Arc-style character arc in the novel, beginning as saintly and ending as sinful. Even her own children label her a “whore” when her affair with Giovanna’s father comes to light. When Giovanna begins rebelling, she calls herself a “whore” worse than Costanza, wanting to shock her friends with how far she’s supposedly fallen because of her sexual choices. Giovanna’s designation as a self-professed sinner eventually unravels when, through growth and self-acceptance, she realizes she can dismantle any and all predefined roles that others set for women.

The affair marks a turning point for Giovanna’s thoughts regarding what constitutes good, evil, and refinement. Aunt Vittoria, the true original owner of the bracelet, becomes refined in Giovanna’s mind, while saintly Costanza (both Giovanna and her mother once envied Costanza’s demeanor), drops in estimation. Giovanna also learns that men, who so often judge and define women, don’t hold themselves to the same standards. Giovanna’s father, for instance, wishes Giovanna to remain the doting daughter he can control, while Roberto reduces Giovanna in the end to a doting sexual object. Mariano sexualizes and infantilizes Giovanna, as do Rosario, Corrado, and Silvestro. Giovanna eventually understands that these assessments of value placed on women’s bodies and actions leave no room for female autonomy. Giovanna ends the novel by choosing when she has sex and with whom, suggesting that adulthood for Giovanna is about choice, autonomy, and fluidity. She takes away the value judgements associated with sinners and saints, thus rejecting having to fit into any one mold.

Literature in The Lying Life of Adults allows Giovanna to escape into a pre-adolescent time of innocence. Giovanna learns about romantic love as a preteen based on romance novels her mother edits for a living. She also loves myths and legends. This literature, along with the Gospels she later reads to better understand Roberto, helps define and redefine innocence in her transition from childhood to adolescence.

Though Giovanna visited Aunt Vittoria as a child, she can’t remember what her aunt looks like. All Giovanna has to define her aunt are stories her parents tell her. When Giovanna first speaks of Aunt Vittoria, she says:

In my house the name Vittoria was like the name of a monstrous being who taints and infects anyone who touches her. […] Vittoria, wherever she was, could hear them and would immediately come rushing […] deliberately dragging behind her all the illnesses […] she would fly into our apartment […] emitting drunken black flashes from her eyes […] (14-15).

In Giovanna’s stories, her aunt is mythical. At different times, she calls Aunt Vittoria an aunt-witch, an enchantress, a gorgon, and a monster. Her childhood innocence projects her aunt into a fabled realm where evil lurks and where Giovanna, if bad, will lurk too later in life. Giovanna’s horror at overhearing that she looks like Aunt Vittoria is a fear of the mythic evil associated with the aunt. A large part of Giovanna’s growth is dismantling this fear of her aunt and understanding that stories can be far more nuanced as one grows older and becomes better able to decipher fact from fiction.

As Giovanna grows, she also notes how male characters don’t suffer the same fate as female characters. Odysseus, for instance, is another mythic figure Giovanna mentions when younger. Odysseus is a tragic hero, while Circe is a witch, and the sirens in his story get branded as seductresses. Even when Giovanna grows up and reads the Gospels, she grows angry at reading about an all-powerful male deity who allows people to suffer. Part of Giovanna’s anger stems from the fact that these characters in myths and stories appear in Giovanna’s real life: Aunt Vittoria as a witch, Costanza as a seductress, and Andrea as an authoritative tragic hero trying to find his way home.

When Andrea flirts with Giovanna’s teacher to help Giovanna’s cause, he’s happy with his behavior and is never branded as a seducer. On the contrary, he and Giovanna joke about his ability to win people over. He also tries adding nuance to the fact that he cheated on his wife by calling Costanza his first love. Giovanna astutely realizes that she and her mother must remain static characters in her father’s selfish story. His choices define who they are in relation to him—at least until Giovanna pushes back. When she refuses to sleep with Roberto, she is rejecting her father and the concept of women as toys and distractions. She even admits when rejecting Roberto that his voice “seemed the most beautiful among my father’s voices” (301). For Giovanna, childhood innocence aligns with authoritative figures looking down on her. She groups her father, God, and Roberto in the category of problematic, authoritative men.

Giovanna breaks free from the warped idea of innocence she harbored for her childhood by growing up and defining herself. Where once she thought herself an innocent child like those in Jesus Christ’s story in the Gospels, she now embraces her own agency. Giovanna’s mother sums her daughter up perfectly, saying, “Your father is younger than you. You’re growing up and he’s still a child. He’ll remain a child forever, an extraordinarily intelligent child hypnotized by his games” (198). Nella’s assessment underscores how an adolescent Giovanna ultimately rejects the authoritative, mythical, and problematic aspects found in her father, in her reading of the Gospels, and in childhood stories. One of the most symbolic gestures Giovanna engages in is leaving Aunt Vittoria’s bracelet behind in the same space in which she loses her virginity. Previously, Giovanna likened the bracelet to the mythical necklace of Harmonia, a bewitched necklace that cursed the wearer or owner in Greek mythology. When Giovanna abandons the bracelet, she abandons the story of the curse along with all the stories she’s been told about female sexuality.