My Brilliant Friend
On Elena Ferrante's novel and friendships and friendship through the years
Are you watching HBO’s My Brilliant Friend?! Are you reading Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet from which the series is based?!?! I keep pushing people to do it because I NEED someone to talk to about it—especially when Season 4 finally drops. Especially because I’ve just finished Book 2. Especially because I’m making my parents watch it now, and that means I’ve just rewatched most of Season 1.
Here, I’ll talk about how I’ve been thinking about friendship for the last year or so. I’m not really sure what I want to say about it, but it’s on my mind. So My Brilliant Friend is an apt eddy for whatever is spinning into being creatively.
The story follows the friendship of Elena Greco and Rafaella Cerullo from their childhood in 1950s Naples to their old age. These two girls then young women then wives then mothers then seniors just keep influencing each other. Ferrante does an amazing job showing how friendship changes over the course of your life, and yet, the thing that draws you together and causes you to keep coming back to the other remains the same.
I’m 40 now, and I have friends that I knew as a child. That I continued to mature with through college. I’ve seen them through weddings and children. But standing at 40, there seems to me another phase of “What is friendship?” “Who is my friend?” “What will they be like in this decade?”
Any thoughts?