My Brilliant Friend and complicated friendships.
A book review.
I’ll be honest — when I first picked up My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, I wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into. It wasn’t even the novel that was first recommended to me, it was the TV series that had just about the same acclaim as the novels did.
I began watching it with my father, a bit of a bonding night in 2022, and after the first episode I wondered how close it was to the novel. Ferrante’s writing and character development was out of this world and I began to really fall deeply in love with this series, resulting in my buying the novel.
This book isn’t just good — it’s addictive. It’s messy, emotional, frustrating, beautiful. It crawled under my skin in a way I didn’t expect, and days after finishing it, I’m still thinking about Lila and Lenu like they’re real people I once knew.
‘it’s like overhearing a conversation you’re not supposed to hear’
Set in a poor neighbourhood of Naples in the 1950s, My Brilliant Friend follows two girls — Elena (or Lenu) and Lila — as they navigate childhood, adolescence, and all the complicated bits in between. They grow up side by side, tangled together by admiration, competition, loyalty, and jealousy. Their friendship is the beating heart of the story, and Ferrante writes it with a rawness that feels almost intrusive. Reading it is like overhearing a conversation you’re not supposed to hear — intimate and unfiltered.
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What floored me the most was how Ferrante captures the shifting power dynamics between friends. Sometimes Lila shines, brilliant and untouchable, while Lenu scrambles to catch up. Other times Lenu has the upper hand, climbing the social ladder through education while Lila’s life narrows. Their relationship isn’t soft or simple — it’s fierce, sometimes cruel, sometimes breathtakingly tender. Honestly, it made me reflect on my own friendships growing up, the ones that felt like lifelines and battlegrounds all at once.
The writing style is deceptively simple — no flashy metaphors or over the top flourishes — but it’s sharp and observant. Ferrante doesn’t romanticise the setting, either. Naples in this book is violent, claustrophobic and unforgiving. Poverty, domestic violence and systemic injustice seep into every chapter, shaping the girls’ choices long before they understand them. It’s a coming-of-age story sure, but it’s also a brutal commentary on class, gender, and survival.
I’ll admit, it’s not a book where a lot of “big” things happen. If you’re wanting action scenes or dramatic twists, you might get fidgety. But if you love stories where emotions simmer just below the surface — where the tension is in a glance, a rumour, a missed opportunity — you’ll be absolutely hooked.
Also, just a heads up the ending will leave you jared. I immediately regretted not having the next book in the Neapolitan Novels series ready to go.
My Brilliant Friend is not just about friendship. It’s about the way people can both save and destroy each other without even meaning to. It’s about ambition, fear, love, and the endless, complicated process of becoming yourself.
Ferrante absolutely nails it. I’m now officially one of those people who will tell everyone they need to read this book and I’m not even a little sorry for it.
