“In losing pieces of life,” Lenù later reflects, “mine lost intensity and importance.” In other words, without each other, the girls feel that they have no audience for their triumphs and failures-no rival and no ally. But Lenù’s thoughts are always consumed by worry and love for Lila, as well as the desire to impress her-and Lila, though often inscrutable, works to make something of herself and prove herself to Lila in a similar way. The girls’ paths diverge as they grow up-Lenù remains in school while Lila drops out and goes to work in her father Fernando’s cobbler shop Lila becomes slender and beautiful in puberty while Lenù grows full-figured and afflicted with acne Lila grows sharp, stoic, and aggressive while Lenù remains softer, quieter, and more romantic. “What you do, I do,” Lenù says to Lila-and the words take on a vow-like quality as the girls continue to grow older.

Lenù barely hesitates before tossing Lila’s doll, Nu, into the cellar as well. The first major instance in Lila and Lenù’s friendship in which the girls realize that their choices revolve around one another comes when, during an afternoon playing with each other’s dolls near a cellar grate, Lila betrays Lenù by throwing Lenù’s doll, Tina, into the dark grate. Over the years, Ferrante charts how their closeness, a fact of their lives that they cling to for protection and sustenance, morphs from a blessing into a curse (and back again) at various points in the girls’ lives. In charting the waxing and waning of the girls’ bond over the years and demonstrating the ways in which Lena and Lenù’s journeys reflect and refract each other’s opinions, ideas, and decisions, Ferrante argues that female friendship has the power to control the course of one’s life and choices-even if the friends themselves rarely discuss this dynamic-because women throughout history have had to rely on female friendship due to their vulnerable status in their respective communities.Įven as first-graders, Lila and Lenù are both aware of a peculiar magnetism between the two of them.

As the two girls grow up together, they find themselves helpless to resist each other’s influence-and as they move from childhood into adolescence, they make sometimes bizarre but always impactful choices based on their desire to impress each other, to draw each other in, or to push each other away. Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend is a novel about many things-community, poverty, violence, toxic masculinity, and education-but at its heart is the profound, complicated relationship between Elena “Lenù” Greco and Rafaella “Lila” Cerullo.

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante