By the time I procured the physical, published version of the book, I had begun to feel skeptical of the Ferrante comparison, which others had made, too. Reading The Copenhagen Trilogy is “a bit like discovering that Lila and Lenú, the fictional heroines of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, were real,” Megan O’Grady wrote in her The Copenhagen Trilogy is a memoir in three discrete parts, beginning with Ditlevsen’s youth, spent as a misunderstood child and aspiring poet, and concluding in adulthood, when Ditlevsen has become a famous author as well as a desperate (and then recovering) addict. Like Ferrante’s narrator, Lenù, Ditlevsen grows up in an insular, working-class neighborhood full of busybodies, where children—and especially girls—aren’t expected to grow up to be writers. Both stories are concerned with how to escape these conditions, and seem to offer similar possibilities: art, love.