When I separated from my husband, I lived in the flat we’d bought together while he lived elsewhere, first with a friend and then in a place that we paid for out of our joint account. I tried to fill it with a life of my own, but I could only manage it in fits and starts. Ferrante inspired one of my first attempts. I invited friends over to talk about her: a former correspondent in Rome for a national newspaper, a political historian, a philosopher, an editor on the magazine I worked at, a publicist for a publisher. I made salad and ordered pizza, which I laid out in boxes on the floor; I mixed cocktails with the bottles of Campari and Martini Rosso I kept around then for late-night Americanos. From old emails, I can see it was August, and I remember the sash windows were open and we smoked inside. We smoked inside my former marital home and we talked about Ferrante. Not everyone knew each other, and so we did talk about the books: the addictions we had to them, the Lilas and Lenùs we knew and which one we feared we were, things we were starting to read about Milanese feminism and the Years of Lead in Italy. The next morning, I took a photo of the coffee table in the living room: an iMac, five tarot cards—the World, Justice, the Fool, Judgment, and Death—laid out in a row, an empty packet of Marlboro menthols, a torn brown paper bag of flat white peaches, an empty plastic box of Ferrero Rocher with gold wrappers crumpled beside it, my eyeglasses, several bottles of wine and an abandoned glass of white, kitchen roll, a hairband, an empty pizza box, and the now lost proof copy of The Story of the Lost Child, facedown. In the email chain the morning after, I told everyone that clearing up felt like dismantling a dream.

I loved that evening. When everyone left I wrote an email to the man I was in love with then, the one who had gone to Wollstonecraft’s grave with me. “It was just fucking amazing,” I wrote to him. “At so many points I looked around the room and was so in love and awe. I want to write something glorious that captures this moment but I’m not at all sure I can do it. I was the quietest. I just put my Dictaphone on. There was so much talk about dissolving the boundaries of the self and I kept thinking of Badiou and what he says about love accommodating the viewpoint of the other and I just thought yes!” It was a time when I was reaching out, beyond what I knew, crudely sometimes, childishly, hopefully, and trying to make a life I could be proud of, that would make sense to me. On evenings like that, my life did make sense to me. It was like a light turning on: yes, this is it, this is me, I have what I need. I didn’t yet know if I could make any of this stay, if I could make shapes and structures, friendships and partnerships that would hold. I didn’t even know if you could keep this sort of energy; I’d never really felt it before. It seems to me now, twenty-five printings later, that I was forcing something into being as much as channeling it—I needed things to be different and I needed accomplices. I was falling in love in so many ways.