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Marisa Tomei is lending her voice for Elena Ferrante’s upcoming novel, The Lying Life of Adults.
The Academy-Award winning actress is making her debut in the audiobook world with the narration of the novel set to be released on Sept. 1, it was announced Monday. Tomei describes recording Ferrante’s audiobook as “very emotional at times.”
“As a devoted fan of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and Neapolitan novels, I was honored and thrilled to be asked to narrate the audiobook for The Lying Life of Adults,” she said. “The recording was very emotional at times — both the director and I cried as we relived the trying, heartbreaking, and exuberant moments from our own girlhood, feelings so specifically captured in Ferrante’s otherworldly writing.”
The Lying Life of Adults (Random House audio) centers on the character Giovanna throughout her childhood and adulthood in Naples, “searching for her reflection in two kindred cities that fear and detest one another.” The novel chronicles Giovanna as she “moves between both in search of the truth, but neither city seems to offer answers or escape.”
“Ferrante illuminates the intricacies and subtle moments of growing up that suddenly make you who you are before you know it,” Tomei says. “Being in Giovanna’s skin, inhabiting such raw adolescent feelings as she faces her own autonomy and agency, sexism, and classism, was a savage, raw confrontation of life in its fullness.”
The anticipation for Ferrante’s new novel follows the success of the authors’ Neapolitan novels, of which My Brilliant Friend is the first. HBO and Italian broadcast network Rai have renewed the series adaptation of My Brilliant Friend for a third season. The Lying Life of Adults is already confirmed to be adapted into a Netflix series.
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