«Una straight line starts from the bottom of via Mazzini – with the private elementary school of the nuns of Sant’Agostino – and proceeds along Corso Giannone, with the middle school, the classical high school and the church of Sant’Antonio, where you meet all the Sundays with their respective families. It is the trajectory that they docilely follow The good girls. Those that Olga Campofreda, born in Caserta in the 80s, tells in her novel (NN publisher).
Olga Campofreda, 36 years old, researcher in Italian and Cultural Studies lives in London. You teach fencing to the England under 20 team.
«The respectable person does not express a moral judgment. It denotes belonging to the upper middle class, and marks the lives of women in pre-established stages» explains Campofreda. «In addition to good schools, attend the boy who will marry them from adolescence. Having a child before the age of thirty. Choosing a job that doesn’t take away space from home and family. The feeling of shame, the fear of being different, of acting outside the pack is implicit in that respectable».
A risk that in the province – of which his Caserta is the emblem – few had the courage to run. Among these the protagonist of Good girlsClara. At the age of twenty she chooses a divergent trajectory, first of all from that of her cousin Rossella, from whom she was inseparable until her adolescence. Clara goes to London where she lives precarious in love and work – gives Italian lessons to bored rich people. A city that also knows Olga Campofreda well, who works in the English capital as a researcher in Italian and Cultural Studies, dealing with Bildungsroman and youth cultures. And that you teach fencing to the England under 20 team.
Good Girls by Olga Campofreda, NN Publisher, 224 pp. €18
Clara returns to Caserta, ten years after her escape, for Rossella’s marriage to her longtime boyfriend Luca. What kind of woman has she become?
Clara fled from a city, from an existential project that didn’t look like her. She is a tree “with roots pointing to the sky” (as Gaia Manzini writes when nominating the novel for the 2023 Strega prize, ed) but she has not yet found the strength to follow her desire. Only when she manages to shape it will she know who she is. The book focuses on this passage, in the comparison between the evolution of Clara and the crystallization of the other, but not all, young women in the assigned role. Arranged to keep it to stifle the deep needs. Like Rossella who limits her rebellion to three days of escape and emptiness. And to the secret diary. In the novel I quote Simone de Beauvoir, my muse together with Amy Winehouse, Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf: «You cannot change your life without first changing yourself».
In Good Girls, Clara’s meetings on Tinder have a lot of space. What role does the App play in history?
Good Girls is the novel of two cities, Caserta and London. Of two palaces, that of Vanvitelli and Buckingham Palace. Of two readings of sexuality. What is the absence of power – Rossella’s “from the waist up” sexuality. And the other, the world of Tinder, which includes many different experiences, not all positive, with which Clara puts herself to the test.
Social expectations are not just about women.
Luca too suffers gender pressures, he feels the push of a desire which he then suffocates. He must excel in his studies, provoke a fight with a boy “who had disrespected him” to show himself a man. He dreams of studying philosophy, but enrolls in law. The only way he sees to conquer freedom is money.
What Caserta is the one of the book?
In the years I grew up, Caserta was at the center of the novels of Antonio Pascale, Roberto Saviano, Francesco Piccolo. A city of men of which I wanted to offer the women’s version. A city where the omnipotence of ties, the cult of appearance, for which it is more important to say one is than to be, has weakened the drive for change. Women hand down traditional roles, there is no evolution: if my story had taken place in Rome instead of Caserta it would have been different. But it is not a novel against Caserta. Mine is a desperate love, and for this reason I wanted to close with Clara’s final reconciliation with the city and with the people who live there. In the promise to question what she doesn’t understand about them, there is her way of rediscovering her roots, now that she has found herself.
You teach fencing: are this discipline and that of writing similar?
Yes, there isn’t a time when I didn’t fight – I spent my adolescence racing at weekends, marginalized in some way from the circle of peers like Clara, nor a time when I didn’t write.
In fencing I was driven by the desire to tie myself more to my father, an athlete himself: he encouraged me to study the intellectual profile of this sport which is the narration of a fight, puts feigned hostility on the stage, up to the final resolution, metaphor of life and death. And I started writing in a diary as a child: the first one was on the cover The Lion King (the 1994 movie). The diary has always been the space for mental elaboration of myself, the space of courage, where I could be more Clara and less Rossella».
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