In the Elena Ferrante interview by Nicola Lagiola Ferrante speaks of the “those freeing themselves of gravitational pull of their birthplace”. This is consistent theme in her Neapolitan novels. It’s the constant pull and push that Elena feels from her birthplace. We see her trying to liberate herself from her native language, break though cultural and social barriers from her past. But can it ever be completely done? It would be like erasing a paper written in pencil, you may remove the lead but the impression on the paper will last forever. I believe the reason Elena constantly refer back to Naples is because regardless of it’s violence, crime, regardless of the terrible events that happened to her in her youth, it is still her safe space. When ever she feels out of sorts she quickly reverts to what is visceral. “And I realized that my voice was taking on the tones of the dialect, out of nervousness, that the words were coming to me in Neapolitan of the neighborhood, that the neighborhood-from the stradone and the tunnel-was imposing its language on me, it’s mode of acting and reacting, its figures, those which in Florence seemed faded images and here were flesh and blood(twlatws pg 326)”.  The past follows us through our lifetime, sometimes the good times maybe remembered as the bad times and sometimes the bad times can be interpreted as the good “The past, in its indeterminacy presents itself either through the filter of nostalgia or the filter of preliminary impressions (Ferrante). Here in America nostalgia is a big business. All around the country we have high school reunions. The four years in high school are for many the worst times in their lives, yet we celebrate and many go to them every 10 years or so, so they can see who got fat, old or ugly. Are we reliving a miserable past or has the past been filtered and become good with time? Like a high school reunion Elena will continue to return to Naples because she can’t help it.