Elena Ferrante

A few years out of my melodramatic teenage years, I savoured Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and all that it presented: two friends looking inwards, in each other’s company; women being indifferent to patriarchy, and a mother accepting a child’s hostile love. This was in 2014, when Ferrante was already a household name, and a favourite on my list of favourites that included Jhumpa Lahiri, Zadie Smith and Mona Simpson. PREMIUM A scene from The Lying Life of Adults (Netflix) 322pp, ₹2267; Europa Editions…

A lot of research went into your last few books. Was that the case for Best of Friends too?It had less research than the previous three novels. The section set in 1988 in Karachi was based on my experience, but there were gaps in my memory. So I would go on Twitter and ask, “Karachi people, give me the names of video shops in the 1980s.” While the first section required little research as I had lived through it and it was about two girls in school, for the latter, I had to figure out what venture capitalists do. I knew…