My Brilliant Friend: why Elena keeps following Lila

Elena Ferrante

Lila has disappeared, and Elena is furious. As she begins to write about their childhood, even the affectionate memories carry an old grievance: Lila could hurt her, then become the person she most wanted beside her.

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Part of a seriesRegularPace: Steady

Editorial estimate, not an exact measurement

An angry woman at her desk

The first person to call Elena about Lila's disappearance is Lila's son, Rino. Elena has little patience with him. When he asks to stay with her because he cannot sleep, she refuses. This is a sharp, unwelcoming entrance to a novel about friendship. Before we meet the girls, we meet a woman who can be cruel.

Lila has removed her belongings and cut herself out of family photographs. Elena begins writing their shared past in anger. She wants to beat Lila at this latest contest. That motive gives the childhood story an edge: every remembered kindness comes from someone with a score to settle. We can listen to Elena without taking her explanations of Lila as the last word. Her closeness to her friend gives her plenty to tell, and plenty to argue about.

The trouble begins with a doll

The girls' early games are awkward. Elena copies Lila's play, changing the words as she goes; a bottle cap becomes a crown. She has a little invention of her own even while taking her cue from Lila. Watching the other girl gives her something to do, and a way to feel less separate from her.

Then Lila drops Elena's doll through a cellar grate. She knows Elena is frightened of what lies below. The meanness is hard to explain away, and Ferrante leaves us with it. Elena's attraction to Lila survives the injury. She keeps seeking out the girl who has just given her a reason to keep her distance.

Up the stairs, two steps behind

When Lila leads the way towards Don Achille's apartment, Elena follows in terror. The man has become a monster in her imagination. On the fourth flight, Lila waits and offers her hand.

The gesture would be less moving if Lila had been a dependable, gentle friend all along. Coming from the girl who frightened her, it changes what Elena can bear. Lila sets the pace, but she also notices the person struggling behind her. The same girl who makes Elena feel small can help her do something she could never manage alone.

Elena can describe her own fear minutely; she has to watch Lila and guess. We know what following costs Elena. Lila's feelings are harder to place. Her offered hand gives us an action to weigh without settling her character for us.

What the neighborhood teaches them

The first volume follows the girls from childhood into adolescence in a poor Naples neighborhood in the 1950s. Elena's desire to keep up with Lila already involves shame and the fear of being left behind. Getting ahead might bring relief; it would also change the terms of their friendship. The girls' ambition has an intimate cost well before either has a chance to leave.

Ferrante told Merve Emre that reading and study provide Elena's route beyond the neighborhood. That prospect makes her dependence on Lila uncomfortable. Elena owes some of her courage to the girl she is competing against. Success could take her away from Lila while leaving the need to impress her intact.

A friendship that can be hard to like

My Brilliant Friend is a promising beginning for readers interested in envy between friends, especially the small humiliations that can sit beside admiration. Elena's willingness to expose her own dependence is compelling. She remembers wanting to follow Lila even when she had reasons to walk away. The account asks us to stay with that embarrassing attachment long enough to understand it.

The harshness may put some readers off. Anyone hoping for comforting companionship will find an angry narrator at the door, and the first book begins a four-volume story. In Ann Goldstein's English translation, the attraction of these opening pages is how close Elena lets us get to feelings she cannot make respectable. She will tell us about Lila, but her account will also expose the person doing the telling.

Three directions to read next

The Door · Magda Szabó

In Magda Szabó's The Door, a writer looks back on her difficult bond with Emerence, the woman who works in her home. Choose it for another narrator whose affection does not settle her responsibility towards the person she describes.

What changes: The women meet as adults, and their dependence grows through domestic work in Hungary. It brings the question of guilt into a single novel rather than following two girls through a quartet.

The Eight Mountains · Paolo Cognetti

Paolo Cognetti's The Eight Mountains follows Pietro and Bruno from boyhood into different adult lives. It offers another friendship in which leaving home and staying there become consequential choices.

What changes: The two friends are men, the setting is the Italian mountains, and Pietro's father is central. The attention to climbing and landscape puts family inheritance beside the changing friendship.

The Summer Book · Tove Jansson

Tove Jansson's The Summer Book lets a girl and her grandmother disagree and care for one another. Try it if you liked the way a small gesture could change the feeling between Ferrante's girls.

What changes: Its Finnish island episodes offer a shorter, quieter read. The difference in age shapes the relationship, with less emphasis on the competition between peers that drives Elena and Lila.

Questions readers ask

What should I read after My Brilliant Friend?

The Story of a New Name is the second volume. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay comes third, followed by The Story of the Lost Child. Together they form the Neapolitan Quartet. The four English volumes appeared from 2012 to 2015.

Are Lina, Lila and Raffaella different characters?

They are names for the same woman. Raffaella Cerullo is her full name, Lina is the name other people use, and Lila is Elena's own name for her. Rino, who calls Elena in the prologue, is her son.

Is the Italian novel written in Neapolitan dialect?

Ferrante describes the novel as Italian with a dialectal cadence and occasional Neapolitan insertions. The television adaptation uses a more extensive reconstruction of the neighborhood's dialect; its spoken language is not a guide to how the entire novel is written.

Sources and editorial approach

This introduction draws on direct reading of the Prologue and Childhood chapters 1 to 3 in Bookreporter's authorised English excerpt, alongside Europa Editions' book description and Ferrante's 2018 interview with Merve Emre. We have not read the complete novel for this piece. The interpretations and reading comparisons are FolioRoam's; the linked publishers supply the comparison books' premises.

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