Reading Elena Ferrante’s novel The Lost Daughter for the first time, Maggie Gyllenhaal, who would go on to adapt and direct it in a critically acclaimed, Oscar nominated film, said that Ferrante “was saying things out loud that I knew to be true, but I had never heard said out loud. And I found that both disturbing and comforting, and I thought, in fact more than that, it was kind of like… a really exciting shock.”

Gyllenhaal’s summation of experiencing Ferrante for the first time is apt. We know these things to be true. But when they are spoken out loud—or, taken a step further, when they are written down, they draw a new, feverish kind of power. Ferrante, the Italian author of nine novels, most translated into English by Ann Goldstein, may publish her work pseudonymously, but the message of her writing is clear: to write the truth of women’s lives, even when it comes to ugly feelings on friendship, marriage, and most damningly, motherhood.