http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2015/08/the_story_of_the_lost_child_the_fourth_of_elena_ferrante_s_neapolitan_novels.html

Very few people know the true identity of the Italian novelist who writes under the pen name Elena Ferrante, but I’d be willing to bet serious money that if we ever learn the truth, her personal history won’t contain a childhood friend very much like Raffaella “Lila” Cerullo. Ferrante’s four Neapolitan novels, the last of which, The Story of the Lost Child, is now being published in its English translation (by Ann Goldstein), have captivated a certain rarified segment of the reading public—mostly women of a literary bent. Fans justly celebrate the addictive properties of these books, a saga that encompasses the entire life of its narrator, a writer named Elena Greco, organizing it around her relationship to Lila, her best friend from their early days growing up in a tough, poor neighborhood in 1950s Naples. Just about everyone assumes the novels are autobiographical, and describes their subject as the ambivalent wonders of “female friendship,” which makes them sound like a tonier version of Sex and the City, only with a lot more fights between the heroines.