While flipping through this book, The Lost Daughter, I smelled a strange odor. It was a damp, slightly moldy smell, like a room that hadn’t been lived in for a long time. I brought the book closer, inhaling itsscent again. Then I caught a hint of sea salt. On the cover was a print of a dark blue sea, with a small white spot in the middle, like a beached seashell.
I read this book in early summer. Outside the window, cicadas were chirping. The air conditioner blew out dry, cold air. But the smell inside the book was completely different — damp, salty, bitter, carrying the odor of something old that wouldn’t wash away. I closed the book, trying to drive those smells out. They wouldn’t leave. They lingered in my memory, like regret lingers in a person’s heart.
Tearing Herself in Half Between Two Daughters and One Person
When Leda was young, she had two daughters. She loved them deeply, but that loveoften overwhelmed her. She described herself as a balloon tied to a rope. At the other end of the rope were her daughters’ hands. The balloon wanted to fly. Every day, she was pulled back and forth between being a mother and being herself. Both sides were crying out in pain.
There is a passage in the book where she is pushing a stroller down the street. Ferrante wrote it like a horror movie. The child in the stroller was crying. The woman inside her — the one who wanted to write, to read, to be herself again — was crying too. The two cries overlapped. She couldn’t tell which one was hers. Her leaving wasn’t because she didn’t love her daughters. It was because she felt that if she didn’t leave, she would jump off the balcony.
Leda left. Three years later, she came back. Her daughters had grown a little older. She returned to the position of mother. But the crack was already there. For the rest of her life, she walked back and forth across that crack.
The Stolen Doll Was the Self She Had Stolen Back
Leda found a forgotten doll on the beach. She didn’t return it to the little girl who was crying and looking for it. Instead, she stuffed it into her bag and took it away. This action was like a stone thrown into a calm sea. From here, the ripples of the entire book began.
In her room, Leda dressed the doll. She talked to it. Sometimes gently, sometimes cruelly. In her hands, the doll became both her own daughter and herself. A middle-aged woman’s inner world became a theater. The doll was the prop. Leda was the director, the actress, and the only audience member.
The doll wasn’t an object. It was a key. It opened the room inside Leda that had been locked for thirty years. In that room sat the young Leda, holding a baby that would not stop crying. The expression on her face wasn’t exhaustion — it was despair. Leda stole the doll because she wanted to steal that young woman out of the room too.
The Sea Breeze in Ferrante’s Writing Carries an Old Smell That Won’t Wash Away
The mothers I had read about before were all gentle and devoted. They put the family’s meal on the table and sat down to eat last. But Leda is not gentle. Not devoted. She is simply a person. A person who wanted to run away when her daughters cried. A person who would steal a doll on the beach. A person who would stare at the ceiling late at night and ask herself what on earth she had done with her life.
You see her standing inside that crack between the identity of mother and the person herself, both hands pressing against the walls on either side, her feet hanging over empty space.
Everyone can see this crack. It is like Leda’s regret. Like the doll’s faded dress. Like the sigh that every mother swallows back down in the middle of the night.
