Rereading My Brilliant Friend: A Subtle Clue About Tina’s Fate?
Warning: Contains spoilers
When I first read My Brilliant Friend, I loved Lila — fiercely, defensively, and sometimes unwillingly. I didn’t always like her. She was a storm of contradictions: brilliant and sharp, but also cruel, volatile, and at times, deeply cold. Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. And I couldn’t stop wondering why the author would give someone like Lila such a devastating fate. Surely anyone would break under the weight of that kind of loss.
Sometimes, in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep, my thoughts drifted to Tina. What had happened to her? Had I missed something in the earlier books — a hint, a detail, some small clue?
So I did what Elena Greco would have done: I started over. I reread the entire series, hoping something — anything — would help explain what happened to Tina. Even the faintest foreshadowing would’ve felt like progress.
What I found instead was a recurring motif: trucks, and the stradone. Of course, they’re present in Book Four, where Tina disappears. But the moment that stayed with me most comes from The Story of a New Name — Book Two — when Lila describes her own imagined death.
Get Abby Hena’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
On page 295, she writes about being hit by a truck while crossing the stradone, her body dragged away, erased. She believes Nino saved her from that fate. And reading it again, I couldn’t help but feel that what Lila feared most for herself is what ultimately happened to Tina. A sudden, meaningless disappearance. A child lost to something cold and fast. And a mother left behind, destroyed.
I know there are other theories. The ending is open, and Ferrante leaves space for interpretation. Some readers think Lila took Tina, or hid her somehow — but that seems completely out of character to me. If Lila had done something that extreme, Elena would’ve sensed it. She wouldn’t have trusted her with her own daughters. Elena saw Lila clearly — even when she didn’t want to.
Other theories mention drowning, or neighborhood violence. And yes, those are possible. But for me, the truck and the stradone make the most sense. It’s not tidy, but it feels right. Maybe it happened quickly. Maybe the driver panicked and took the body. Maybe someone cleaned up after it. This is fiction, and Ferrante is a master of ambiguity. The point isn’t to solve it — it’s to feel the weight of not knowing.
As for the final pages, where Lila returns the doll — I don’t think it’s meant to signal that she found Tina. I think it’s just Ferrante bringing us back to the beginning. That moment closes the circle. It makes you want to start reading all over again, looking for answers that may not exist.
The second time I read the series, I felt differently about everyone. Elena still annoyed me at times, but I appreciated her ambition more. She’s relentless. She fights for everything she has. Lila, on the other hand, had no support system. That loss shaped her. She burned through interests and obsessions, but they were often things others were excited about — not passions she discovered on her own.
Lila could be manipulative. She used Elena, pulled strings like people were dolls. I was deeply unsettled by the way she made Alfonso dress like her. And yes, she may have even harmed a child Elena was babysitting — something dark enough to cost Elena her job. But even with all that, I still can’t believe she would hurt Tina. That doesn’t feel like the truth.
So I come back to the truck. The stradone. The idea that what Lila feared most finally happened — not to her, but to the person she loved most. That, I believe, is the tragedy at the heart of Ferrante’s story.
Note: I wrote this piece based on my own reflections and rereading of the books. Some sentences were lightly edited with the help of a language tool, but all the thoughts and ideas are mine.
