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. 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. 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.
Even as first-graders, Lila and Lenù are both aware of a peculiar magnetism between the two of them. 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. 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. Lenù barely hesitates before tossing Lila’s doll, Nu, into the cellar as well. “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. 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. 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. “In losing pieces of [Lila’s] 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. As both girls’ vulnerability rises alongside their entry into womanhood, they feel the need to cling to each other even more deeply—even as barriers to their closeness, the consequences of their newfound adolescence, creep into their relationship.
As Lila and Lenù grow older, their friendship continues to influence their individual choices as they seek to confirm their bond in the face of mounting troubles with men. Their relationships with men are socially necessary but often leave them vulnerable to violence or lack of agency—so Lila and Lenù attempt to continue circling each other even as circumstance pulls them apart. Another major instance in which Lenù reflects on the entwined nature of her and Lila’s fates—a quality which she herself has made sure to imbue their friendship with over the years—occurs as Lenù helps wash and dress Lila for her wedding to Stefano Carracci, their childhood bully and the son of the deceased loan shark Don Achille, toward the end of the novel. As Lenù imagines, in great and horrific detail, Lila losing her virginity on her wedding night, she is full of stark revulsion. She determines that “the only remedy against the pain I was feeling […] was to find a corner secluded enough so that [my boyfriend] Antonio could do to me, at the same time, the exact same thing.” This passage is perhaps the most pointed moment in the entire novel related to the ways in which female friendship steers one’s impulses and decision-making. Lenù and Lila have been competitive all their lives, but in this moment, the more sexually experienced Lenù isn’t jealous of Lila reaching the threshold of losing her virginity first. This passage instead suggests that Lenù simply wants to experience what Lila is feeling—whether it is pleasure, pain, degradation, or anything else—at the same time her friend is experiencing it out of solidarity. Lenù cannot imagine her friend having an experience she can’t relate to for fear that it would drive them apart, and so Lenù wants to make sure that she and Lila experience the exact same thing at the exact same moment, for as long as they can. At the most vulnerable moment of Lila’s life, Lenù wants to make herself vulnerable too, in hopes of symbolically making her friend feel less alone and thus stronger.
By showing how Lila and Lenù go through life entwined with one another out of a desire to be less alone (and to help the other feel less alone as well,) Ferrante demonstrates how female friendship—with its attendant pressures, problems, and possibilities—can be a force powerful enough to define one’s life. Though Lila and Lenù often fail to communicate the ways in which they look to each other for guidance or admit how profoundly they depend on each other, they nonetheless circle each other, emulate each other, and compete with each other as their friendship proves itself to be the driving force behind the major decisions of their lives.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Female Friendship ThemeTracker
Female Friendship Quotes in My Brilliant Friend
I was really angry.
We’ll see who wins this time, I said to myself. I turned on the computer and began to write—all the details of our story, everything that still remained in my memory.
Anyway, however it had happened, the fact was this: Lila knew how to read and write, and what I remember of that gray morning when the teacher revealed it to us was, above all, the sense of weakness the news left me with.
Something convinced me, then, that if I kept up with her, at her pace, my mother’s limp, which had entered into my brain and wouldn’t come out, would stop threatening me. I decided I had to model myself on that girl, never let her out of my sight, even if she got annoyed and chased me away.
I merely threw into the cellar her Nu, the doll she had just given me.
Lila looked at me in disbelief.
“What you do, I do,” I recited immediately, aloud, very frightened.
“Now go and get it for me.”
“If you go and get mine.”
We went together.
Things changed and we began to link school to wealth. We thought that if we studied hard we would be able to write books and that the books would make us rich. Wealth was still the glitter of gold coins stored in countless chests, but to get there all you had to do was go to school and write a book.
"All they did was beat you?"
"What should they have done?"
"They're still sending you to study Latin?"
I looked at her in bewilderment.
Was it possible? She had taken me with her hoping that as a punishment my parents would not send me to middle school? Or had she brought me back in such a hurry so that I would avoid that punishment? Or—I wonder today—did she want at different moments both things?
I tried to remind her of the old plan of writing novels… […] I was stuck there, it was important to me. I was learning Latin just for that, and deep inside I was convinced that she took so many books from Maestro Ferraro's circulating library only because, even though she wasn't going to school anymore, even though she was now obsessed with shoes, she still wanted to write a novel with me and make a lot of money. Instead, she shrugged… […] "Now," she explained, "to become truly rich you need a business."
I told her in a rush that I was going to the high school. […] I did it because I wanted her to realize that I was special, and that, even if she became rich making shoes with Rino, she couldn't do without me, as I couldn't do without her.
She looked at me perplexed.
"What is high school?" she asked.
"An important school that comes after middle school."
"And what are you going there to do?"
"Study."
"What?"
"Latin,"
"That's all?"
"And Greek."
[…]
She had the expression of someone at a loss, finding nothing to say. Finally she murmured, irrelevantly, "Last week I got my period."
She had begun to study Greek even before I went to high school? She had done it on her own, while I hadn’t even thought about it, and during the summer, the vacation? Would she always do the things I was supposed to do, before and better than me?
[Lila] was staring at the shadow of her brother—the most active, the most arrogant, shouting the loudest, bloodiest insults in the direction of the Solaras' terrace—with repulsion. It seemed that she, she who in general feared nothing, was afraid. […] We were holding on to each other to get warm, while they rushed to grab cylinders with fat fuses, astonished by Stefano's infinite reserves, admiring of his generosity, disturbed by how much money could be transformed into fiery trails, sparks, explosions, smoke for the pure satisfaction of winning.
“What would it cost you to let him see them?” I asked, confused.
She shook her head energetically. “I don’t even want him to touch them.”
Lila was able to speak through writing; unlike me when I wrote, unlike Sarratore in his articles and poems, unlike even many writers I had read and was reading, she expressed herself in sentences that were well constructed, and without error, even though she had stopped going to school, but—further—she left no trace of effort, you weren't aware of the artifice of the written word. I read and I saw her, I heard her.
What did she have in mind? She had to know that she was setting in motion an earthquake worse than when she threw the ink-soaked bits of paper. And yet it might be that she wasn't aiming at anything precise. She was like that, she threw things off balance just to see if she could put them back in some other way.
I established convergences and divergences. In that period it became a daily exercise: the better off I had been in Ischia, the worse off Lila had been in the desolation of the neighborhood; the more I had suffered upon leaving the island, the happier she had become. It was as if, because of an evil spell, the joy or sorrow of one required the sorrow or joy of the other; even our physical aspect, it seemed to me, shared in that swing.
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.
She has Stefano, I said to myself after the episode of the glasses. She snaps her fingers and immediately has my glasses repaired. What do I have?
I answered that I had school, a privilege she had lost forever. That is my wealth, I tried to convince myself.
When she gave me back the notebook, she said, "You're very clever, of course they always give you ten."
I felt that there was no irony, it was a real compliment. Then she added with sudden harshness:
"I don't want to read anything else that you write."
"Why?"
She thought about it.
"Because it hurts me," and she struck her forehead with her hand and burst out laughing.
"Whatever happens, you'll go on studying."
"Two more years: then I'll get my diploma and I'm done."
"No, don't ever stop: I'll give you the money, you should keep studying."
I gave a nervous laugh, then said, "Thanks, but at a certain point school is over."
"Not for you: you're my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of all, boys and girls."
In the end there was only the hostile thought that I was washing her from her hair to the soles of her feet, early in the morning, just so that Stefano could sully her in the course of the night. I imagined her naked as she was at that moment […] His violent flesh entered her with a sharp blow, like the cork pushed by the palm into the neck of a wine bottle. And it suddenly seemed to me that the only remedy against the pain I was feeling […] was to find a corner secluded enough so that Antonio could do to me, at the same time, the exact same thing.
Nothing diminished the disappointment. […] I had considered the publication of those few lines […] as a sign that I really had a destiny, that the hard work of school would surely lead upward, somewhere, that Maestra Oliviero had been right to push me forward and to abandon Lila. "Do you know what the plebs are?" "Yes, Maestra." At that moment I knew what the plebs were… […] The plebs were us. The plebs were that fight for food and wine, that quarrel over who should be served first and better, that dirty floor on which the waiters clattered back and forth, those increasingly vulgar toasts.
