My Brilliant Friend, the first in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Series, is a heart-bursting, breath-taking account of female friendship. Set in a small town outside of Naples, where the sea is just out of sight, the quartet follows best friends Lila and Elena as they evolve both personally and together. Ferrante’s writing shimmers with the “intensity and importance ” of a first love, but it reveals something even more mysterious: Translated from the original Italian by Anne Goldstein, My Brilliant Friend depicts the kind of complex dynamic that many young women experience in their early friendships but may not know how to name. 

            As a young girl, Lila is “disheveled and dirty” with skinny ankles and bright eyes that are quick to narrow during an argument. The daughter of a local shoemaker, she has lofty goals: to publish her own book, to see the ocean, to expand the Cerullo shoe factory, and perhaps above all, to have money. Beginning on New Year’s Eve, 1958, and continuing sporadically through the rest of her life, Lila experiences “episodes of dissolving margins,” in which it seems that “something absolutely material, which had been present around her and around everyone and everything forever, but imperceptible was breaking down the outlines of persons and things and revealing itself” (Ferrante 90). The 2020 coronavirus pandemic has caused a similar sensation of things breaking down. With the new authorized vaccine, people are hoping for a return to ‘normal’ but there’s a lot to rebuild. Since last winter, schools closed, restaurants struggled, there was a great global pause. In other words, the margins have been dissolving. Ferrante’s novel is a reminder that even when time stops, when the outlines blur and life loses structure, old friendships are the thing that provide meaning. As all friends do, Lila and Elena experience conflict as they grow up together. Even so, it’s their closeness, through the good and bad, that grounds them to a meaningful reality when their world in the neighborhood feels like it’s unraveling around them. 

            While  Lila grows into being the “Jacqueline Kennedy” of the neighborhood, Elena notices unhappy changes in herself. She irritates her face by picking at pimples and begrudgingly wears glasses to school, like a brand of punishment from the universe. Typical adolescent changes bother Elena. She reflects, “I felt at the mercy of obscure forces acting inside my body, I was always agitated” (Ferrante 96). Meanwhile, external developments in the neighborhood are acting on her too, like the moon pulling rhythmically on Mediterranean tides. She thinks deeply about the neighborhood rivalries and the hierarchy of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. She wonders what it means to be a communist, what it means to be a pleb. Mostly, Elena thinks about Lila, and the ways that their lives overlap and diverge, their fates ebbing and flowing like the tides, at the mercy of obscure forces.

            The saga of their life-long friendship begins as a sort of nested story, when Lila’s son calls Elena and reports that his mother has gone missing. Calmly, Elena tells him to let it be, casually advising, “Learn to stand on your own two feet and don’t call me again, either” (Ferrante 20). Meanwhile, she herself begins to recount her story with Lila, starting from the time they met in first grade. The drama of this opening sequence reveals a relationship that surpasses familial bonds and even time in its strength. A wise Elena seems to sigh knowingly, “It’s been at least three decades since she told me that she wanted to disappear without leaving a trace, and I’m the only one who knows what she means” (Ferrante 20). Elena’s narrative reads like a reflective autobiography, or maybe a journal entry and in our current moment, when many people have found themselves dusting off old diaries, or stalking estranged college buddies on Facebook, a sense of voyeurism into Ferrante’s world feels especially comforting .

            Maybe it’s been months since you’ve seen your best friend. You could be tired of your family or the partner you’re quarantined with and craving the kind of laugh that only your friend can provoke. Like a love story, My Brilliant Friend is an ode to the friendships that keep us afloat despite the difficulties. Most coming-of-age stories perpetuate the fairy-tale falsehood that girls should fall in love to become someone. In Stephen Frears’s flip 2000 film adaptation of Nick Hornby’s romcom High Fidelity, rock n roll snob Rob Gordon (John Cusack) looks at the camera and says, “What’s really important isn’t what you’re like, it’s what you like.” Rob Gordon would be happy to know that the first time I heard David Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust,” I was sitting at the back of the bus with my middle school crush. We were sharing headphones so he could show me his favorite music. Although I have since outgrown my infatuation — with the boy, not with Bowie — I still recall the moment as thrilling and formative to my identity as a young woman. These stories are commonplace: teenage girls overwhelmed with a Molly Ringwald syndrome, their bildungsroman dependent on transformative romantic or sexual experiences. Furthermore, in the life of a young girl, what really matters is who likes who. Elena and Lila are well aware of the ways that romance has significance. Like writing a proof for a math problem, Elena analyzes love in terms of social hierarchy, power and adulthood:

 

"If Pasquales love was a sign for how much someone could like Lila - the  love of    Marcello — a young man who was handsome, wealthy, with a car, who was harsh and violent, a Camorrist, used, that is, to taking the women he wanted - was, in my eyes, in the eyes of all my contemporaries, and in spite of his bad reputation, in fact because of it, a promotion, the transition from skinny little girl to woman capable of making anyone bend to her will" (Ferrante 184).

 

Elena might resent Lila for the romantic attention she gets, but most importantly she realizes that she might lose her friend to the lure of worldly things like love and money. 

            In young adulthood, to have a crush is to relinquish some of your freewill, to be overwhelmed with the pressing need to scribble someone’s name all over a blank notebook. Female friendships have the same weight, which Elena quickly realizes: “I soon had to admit that what I did by myself couldn’t excite me, only what Lila touched became important. If she withdrew, if her voice withdrew from things, the things got dirty, rusty” (Ferrante 100). Of course, there is plenty of romance in Elena’s young life, too. The neighborhood boys take an interest in her, especially when she starts wearing a bra. She goes out with a few of them, and even feels particularly enchanted by Nino, thinking, “What foolishness it had been to want him, to love him, and yet always to avoid him” (Ferrante 325). However, her friendship with Lila is what truly captures her mind, in an obsession that is both crushing and exhilarating. 

            Recently, popular culture has burst with stories of female friendships that depict all the bittersweet messiness of growing up. Television shows like Broad City (2014) and Pen15 (2019) use self-aware gimmicks and moments of “cringe-humor” to explore the extremes of having a BFF as a young woman. In fact, HBO picked up My Brilliant Friend in 2018, and spun the drama into a two-season ode to female friendship. These series have been fun to binge during quarantine, but Ferrante’s storytelling stands out because she writes about the sweet messiness of platonic love with the sophistication and romance of a classic coming-of-age love story. 

             The powerful depiction of Lila and Elena’s friendship affirms the seriousness of all those school-night sleepover and late-night phone calls that define the adolescent experience of many young girls. In fact, their relationship reminds us that in many ways, having a first best friend is just as infatuating as a first love. Close friendships might be even more influential in the way that young girls form their identities and make sense of the world around them. For example, Elena’s obsession with Lila’s presence pushes her to become a pet-student. She reflects, “I devoted myself to studying and to many things that were difficult, alien to me, just so I could keep pace with that terrible, dazzling girl” (Ferrante 47). Her devotion is overwhelming and consumes every aspect of her life. Elena constantly compares herself to Lila, whether in body type, affinity for learning Greek, or ability to acquire a boyfriend. Do all young women have a Lila? Should they? 

            Anecdotally, I clearly remember an impressionable moment of dissolving margins with my best friend. On a walk home from Sunday school, I made a remark that I had heard adults say, how ridiculous that the new prayer books refer to God with she/her pronouns. My friend, already well into her personal feminist education, pushed back, slightly confused. She questioned me, and drew me gently into a juvenile conversation about feminism as a movement, ideology, identity. Elena Ferrante herself says about feminism, “I hope that things change and that girls will realize that we have millenniums of subservience behind us, that the struggle should continue and that if we lower our guard, it won’t take much to eliminate what, at least on paper, four generations of women have with great difficulty gained” (Jacob). I am not sure when I would have discovered the legacy of feminist struggle for myself. While I should have felt only gratitude, my friend’s knowledge and passion filled me with an anxiety that Ferrante captures in every moment between Lila and Elena. When Lila’s family prevents her from going to middle school, Elena feels mixed with pity and pride: “She was suffering and I didn’t like her sorrow. I preferred her when she was different from me, distant from my anxieties. And the uneasiness that the discovery of her fragility brought me was transformed by secret pathways into a need of my own to be superior” (Ferrante 81). The competitive relationship between the two girls pushes them to grow in new ways. Through their struggles to understand one another and themselves, they learn about the world at large. 

            Alison Lee analyzes the psychological implications of the type of friendship depicted by Lila and Elena in an article from the British Journal of Psychotherapy, titled “Feminine identity and Female Friendships in the ‘Neapolitan’ Novels of Elena Ferrante.” She relates the friends’ complex dynamic to Otto Fenichel’s 1954 study of ‘Trophy and triumph’ “Where rivalry is managed through the ‘dissolving’ of a less powerful partner into the more powerful one through ‘the kind of love according to which one loves the person who is what one would like to be oneself’” (Lee). Elena nearly ‘dissolves’ into Lila. She even summons Lila’s feisty spirit to come up with retorts for bothersome boys, and claims Lila’s philosophical reflections as her own in school. Elena tries to separate herself, finding new peers like Carmela to gossip and study with in the courtyard. Still, her mind always turns to Lila. She admits to herself, “The more I talked, though, the more I realized, to my own embarrassment, that I was trying to make Lila’s new passion my own” (Ferrante 100). 

            Maybe subconsciously, Elena makes it a habit to measure the quality of her life in comparison to her friend’s. Their friendship begins with silent competition, in a series of childish challenges: “Lila would thrust her hand and then her whole arm into the black mouth of a manhole, and I, in turn, immediately did the same, my heart pounding, hoping that the cockroaches wouldn’t run over my skin, that the rats wouldn’t bit me” (Ferrante 27). Later, in adolescence, between the hours that Elena spends scrutinizing Latin and Greek texts, she obsessively parses out her relationship with Lila. When the girls turn 15, and wealthy suitors start noticing Lila, Elena reflects: “Money gave even more force to the impression that what I lacked she had, and vice versa, in a continuous game of exchanges and reversals that, now happily, now painfully, made us indispensable to each other” (Ferrante 259). The love between the two girls is clearly boundless, but then so is everything else. 

            A 2016 study called “Competition, Coping, and Closeness in Young Heterosexual Adults’ Same-Gender Friendships” determined that competition in arenas like academics, peer-acceptance, and romantic appeal, “Could involve risks both to one’s sense of competence and to ones perceived support from the friend” (Mcguire and Leaper). Indeed, applying the study to the young protagonists of My Brilliant Friend, Elena seems to project her own self-worth onto Lila. She even struggles to determine where her personality ends and Lila’s begins. It’s almost an eerie doubling, like in the Gothic story of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde'' where Robert Louis Stevenson uses a split personality to examine the presence of good and evil within. But in My Brilliant Friend, Ferrante intertwines the lives of Elena and Lila in order to examine how the pressure of an intense bond can produce meaningful identity. 

             When asked about the inspiration for My Brilliant Friend in a rare interview, Elena Ferrante said, “One never knows where a story comes from; it’s the product of a variety of suggestions that, together with others that you are not aware of and never will be, excite your mind” (Jacob). Growing up is a similar process. Among other puzzling forces, people are the random product of hormonal shifts, social changes, and the influence of their friendships. 

            So who is the brilliant friend? Elena is the narrative voice of My Brilliant Friend, and she writes about Lila’s wit with a grudging awe, saying, “Her quickness of mind was like a hiss, a dart, a lethal bite” (Ferrante 28). However, in the most intimate scene between the two girls, Ferrante nakedly addresses their brilliantly blurred dynamic. Lila insists that Elena dedicate her life to studying. When Elena laughs, saying that school eventually ends, Lila replies, “Not for you: you are my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of all, boys and girls” (Ferrante 312). The urgency behind Lila’s words reveals the way the girls are connected in many ways, but most importantly in their respect for each other. The moment moves quickly. In the next line, Elena remarks, “I had never seen her naked, I was embarrassed” (Ferrante 312). It is a scene of dissolving margins, where the obscure forces that connect Lila and Elena become brilliantly clear.