The life story of Elena Ferrante, whoever she or he may be

Elena Ferrante - who is she? She's (or he's?) a writer a pseudonym for a writer about whom the public knows literally nothing other than what we know through her works of fiction; she outdoes even Pynchon and Salinger, in that she has never publicly disclosed her name or any biographical information of any sort (though, unlike Pynchon, she has done some interviews online or through correspondence about her work - she's not one who refuses to comment but one who refuses to disclose autobiographical information - not that the work must speak for itself but rather that the author's life has no significance in our judgment or enjoyment of the work). That said, it's especially strange to begin reading her Neapolitan trilogy, the first volume of which - My Brilliant Friend - seems by all evidence to be a very closely autobiographical story of a young girl growing up in a tough working-class neighborhood in Naples, in about 1950. The narrator - Elena - focuses on her lifelong friendship with Lila, her on-an-off rival for position as smartest kid in the school, but Lila is much more tough and unconventional, more daring. The first third of the volume establishes the culture of the neighborhood - lots of blood feuds and rivalries among the families, which trickle down to the schoolchildren who get in fights that carry on the same feuds of pride and prejudice. As the girls finish elementary school and move to middle school - which requires an entrance exam (rather amazing to see the limits of public education opportunities in post-war Italy), the girls drift apart: Lila's parents keeping her out of school so that she can help in the family shoe-repair business. The tone of the novel is simple and matter-of-fact, extremely easy to read, at least on the surface, though there are a lot of characters and families, which are sometimes hard to keep straight. Compared with the great European autobiographical sagas - Proust, Knausgaard, to name two I've also been reading over the years - this is the least literary and reflective; Ferrante stays closely to the facts of her childhood without long passages to analyze her experience from the adult point of view. Though she has a few breaks in chronology - the first section is contemporary and tells us of Lila's sudden disappearance at age 60 or so - she stays pretty much in straightforward chronology (unlike KOK). Assuming the events in the novel closely track her childhood - which maybe they don't? - I would guess that, even in this non-literary culture of her youth - there would be plenty of people who could identify the elusive author.