My Brilliant Friend
My Brilliant Friend
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Summaries & Analyses
Author Insights
Quizzes
NEWReading Tools
Elena Ferrante on My Brilliant Friend
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A friendship too difficult to leave aloneFerrante has never been able to identify a single moment when My Brilliant Friend began, and she treats that uncertainty as evidence of how stories actually form, through accumulation rather than ignition.
It may have had its origin in the death of a friend of mine, or in a crowded wedding celebration, or perhaps in the need to return to themes and images of an earlier book, ‘The Lost Daughter.’ 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.
Whatever the story’s murky origins, one anchor was clear: a real friendship, begun in childhood, that she refused to render sentimental. The novel draws on what she described to Vanity Fair as a relationship that was long, complicated, and difficult, and the texture of that difficulty was precisely what she wanted to preserve.
Our friendships... are a terra incognita, chiefly to ourselves, a land without fixed rules. Anything and everything can happen to you, nothing is certain. Its exploration in fiction advances arduously, it is a gamble, a strenuous undertaking. And at every step there is above all the risk that a story’s honesty will be clouded by good intentions, hypocritical calculations, or ideologies that exalt sisterhood in ways that are often nauseating.
The novel’s willingness to stay inside that discomfort rather than resolve it is not an oversight. It is the project.
Before Ferrante could believe that a story centered entirely on women’s inner lives deserved serious literary ambition, she needed proof that such a thing was possible. She found it in a single novel by Elsa Morante, an Italian writer whose work shaped her sense of what fiction could claim.
The book through which I discovered that an entirely female story — entirely women’s desires and ideas and feelings — could be compelling and, at the same time, have great literary value.
How she wrote it
A first draft that arrived like a partyFerrante began writing My Brilliant Friend in 2009 with no map. Her method, consistent across her career, is to resist advance planning so completely that even describing a story aloud can kill her desire to write it.
No, I never plan my stories. A detailed outline is enough for me to lose interest in the whole thing. Even a brief oral summary makes the desire to write what I have in mind vanish. I am one of those who begin to write knowing only a few essential features of the story they intend to tell. The rest they discover line by line.
After years of writing earlier novels that she has described as struggle, the first draft of the Neapolitan story arrived differently. She spent roughly a year producing a manuscript that covered Elena and Lila’s entire lives, and the experience was unlike anything she had written before.
The first draft rolled along without running into any obstacles: The pure pleasure of telling a story dominated. Also, the work that ensued in the following years was surprisingly easy, a kind of permanent party.
Revision expanded the text rather than cutting it. By the end of 2010, the material for just the childhood and adolescence sections had grown large enough that she and her publisher decided to publish it separately. What she had conceived as one long novel became the first of four.
The thorniest formal decision was what to do with Lila, the novel’s magnetic secondary figure. Early drafts gave Lila her own point of view, but Ferrante cut those passages entirely. The reasoning goes to the heart of how the book works.
Lila can only be Elena’s tale: outside that tale she would probably be unable to define herself. It’s the people who love us or hate us — or both — who hold together the thousands of fragments we are made of.
The personal thread
Naples as the self she keeps rewritingFerrante’s anonymity has made her relationship to Naples the most concrete biographical fact readers can hold onto. She has spoken of the city not as a setting she chose but as something closer to a condition she was born into, one she returns to in writing because the looking is reciprocal.
Naples is already part of me, as I am of Naples. I don’t have to look for a view of Naples, I’ve had it since birth. I write about it again and again to see it and see myself and so that it sees me, more and more clearly.
Ferrante conducts all interviews in writing and has never appeared in public under her own name. She offered the most compact statement of what that choice means during an appearance on CUNY TV, where the question of whether books require their authors to stand behind them came up directly.
I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. [paraphrased from audio]
That position is consistent with how she has operated since her first publication in 1992: the work circulates; she does not. The Neapolitan novels became a global phenomenon while their author remained entirely invisible, which is itself a kind of argument about where meaning actually lives.
What she wants us to sit with
Solidarity, preparation, and a world not yet builtFerrante is not a writer who claims tight control over what her books mean, and she has said directly that the full weight of My Brilliant Friend surprised her. She discovered what she had written slowly, the way a reader would.
I think that writers never really know what book they’ve written. We tell a story and try to do our best, pouring onto the page our experience, our literary sensibility, without sparing ourselves. I realized very slowly that the book contained in itself much more than what I thought I had written. Certainly I wished to describe a friendship that lasts a lifetime. Certainly I knew clearly that Lila would contain the worst and the best of what I know about my sex.
On what she wants young women to carry away from the Neapolitan novels, Ferrante is more deliberate, and the stakes she names go well past the individual story of Elena and Lila. The preparation she calls for is not professional or personal in any narrow sense.
I hope the books communicate the urgent need for solidarity between women. I’d like the youngest readers to take from them the necessity of being properly prepared: not in order to be co-opted into male hierarchies but in order to construct a world different from the one we know, and to govern it.