The rare times we met we preferred to be silent about all the things we had left to say to each other.
-- Delia (Narrator) (chapter 3)

Importance: At Amalia’s funeral, Delia reunites with her two sisters, admitting that her relationship with them is distant. These three individuals have different interests and are united by only one commonality: their childhood. This implies that the sisters faced trauma in their youth and, even decades later, ignore the impact that these experiences have had on their current lives. Even if the three women have different personalities, their insistence on pushing away their past is a uniting characteristic. For Delia, these memories easily resurface; since her sisters behave similarly in their stubborn denial to face the past, they are likely also haunted by these childhood memories. Elena Ferrante mentions this detail early in the novel to foreshadow the deeper layers of abuse and domestic violence that will come...