Book Club Guide

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

by Elena Ferrante · 2013 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

The published writer and the nagging doubt that she is not the brilliant one
Factory work as a form of class war — and Lila's response to it
What leaving costs, and what staying costs — and whether either is a choice

About this book

The third Neapolitan novel follows Elena and Lila through the upheaval of the 1970s — Elena as a published novelist, Lila working in squalid factory conditions. Ferrante's novel is about how people escape poverty and what they give up in the process — and about whether the one who leaves can ever truly leave.

Published in Italian in 2013, the third Neapolitan novel covers the turbulent 1970s and the women's movement that helped shape both Elena and Lila's developing consciousness.

Discussion questions

Elena publishes a novel and is celebrated — but Ferrante shows us her persistent doubt that Lila is the more genuinely brilliant writer. What is this self-doubt doing — psychologically and politically?
Lila organises workers in the sausage factory. How does Ferrante show the physical and political reality of factory conditions — and what does this grounding in material reality do for a novel about female friendship?
The political upheaval of 1970s Italy is the backdrop — student movements, factory protests, political violence. How does Ferrante integrate this history — as context or as central to the argument?
Elena's marriage to Pietro becomes another form of constraint. How does Ferrante develop the pattern — is there any escape, or does every relationship reproduce the original neighborhood?
By the third volume, the friendship between Elena and Lila has become enormously complex. What is Ferrante saying about female friendship at this stage — is it still beautiful, or has it become something else?