10 Fascinating Insights into 'My Brilliant Friend'

With My Brilliant Friend (L’amica Geniale in Italian), Elena Ferrante's first novel in her deeply personal yet expansive Neapolitan quartet, readers were drawn into the post-war atmosphere of Naples. Although the famously elusive author often remains quiet and even contradictory in interviews, we can gather valuable understanding about the book from her sparse public statements and those made by her collaborators.   

1. Elena Ferrante views it as part of a grander narrative.

Many fans of My Brilliant Friend were delighted to discover that the story of Elena and Lila doesn’t conclude at the end of the novel. It’s the opening chapter of a four-part series (the Neapolitan Novels) chronicling the complicated friendship between two Italian women from childhood through adulthood. Although each book was released separately, Ferrante has emphasized that she regards My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child as four segments of “a single novel.” 

2. My Brilliant Friend is celebrated as a contemporary masterpiece.

Released in Italy in 2011, My Brilliant Friend has quickly earned its place as a modern classic. In 2019, Entertainment Weekly named the four Neapolitan Novels the best book series of the decade. Other renowned outlets like Vulture and The Guardian have gone even further, placing My Brilliant Friend among the top books of the 21st century so far.

3. It has been translated into 45 different languages.

Beyond critical acclaim, My Brilliant Friend has achieved enormous financial success. Less than ten years after its release, the first book in the Neapolitan Novels series had sold over 5 million copies. The series is now available in 45 languages.

4. The author's true identity remains a secret.

As readers delved into the beautifully crafted narrative of a decades-spanning friendship between the two protagonists in Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, many felt a deep connection with the author herself. This literary closeness was complicated by the mystery of Ferrante’s true identity, as “Elena Ferrante” remains a pseudonym.

Frantumaglia (meaning “a jumble of fragments”) compiles Ferrante’s so-called non-fiction writings. Despite her declared aim “to orchestrate lies that always tell … the truth” in interviews, these fragments offer insights into the “real” Ferrante. Naples clearly plays a pivotal role in her life, although she claims to have “run away as soon as [she] could.” Writing is a passion, yet one hindered by fear and self-doubt. The book provides various reasons for Ferrante’s anonymity, including “a somewhat neurotic desire for intangibility” and a lack of “physical courage.” These self-deprecating reflections likely reveal part of Ferrante’s hesitations, but she hints at a more profound force behind her decision: “Writing with the knowledge that I don’t have to appear produces a space of absolute creative freedom. It’s a corner of my own that I intend to defend.”

5. The cover design is intentionally kitschy.

My Brilliant Friend is celebrated as a modern literary classic, yet its cover designs may not immediately suggest this status. Featuring heavily edited photos of faceless stock models, the covers have been compared to those of supermarket romance novels. The publishers assert that this unexpected cheesiness is deliberate. Ferrante’s art director explained to Slate in 2015, “many people didn’t understand the game we were playing, that of, let’s say, dressing an extremely refined story with a touch of vulgarity.”

6. The original draft allowed both friends to narrate.

One of the key tensions in My Brilliant Friend lies in identifying the brilliant friend in question. Readers might assume that the narrator, Elena “Lenù” Greco, is the one speaking the title, as she describes her friend Lila as “the best among us” while calling herself “second in everything.” The novel often explores how the girls' perceptions of themselves and each other evolve, and yet it remains a striking moment when Lila tells Elena (emphasis added), “you’re my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of all, boys and girls.”

This surprising yet inevitable shift in expectations may not have had the same impact had the story not been entirely told from Elena’s perspective. Interestingly, Ferrante wasn’t initially certain about this approach.

Ferrante revealed in an interview that “there were long episodes” originally written by Lila in the first draft. Eventually, Ferrante decided that the novel needed a single narrator, leaving readers to wonder what Lila might have written about the end of her formal education or imagining the prose she could have crafted in telling her version of The Blue Fairy.

7. It was turned into an HBO series.

After the tremendous critical and commercial success of Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, it was inevitable that the series would be adapted for the screen. The first season of the television adaptation of My Brilliant Friend, a collaboration between HBO and the Italian broadcaster Rai, debuted in 2018. Although it takes its name from the first book, the series is set to cover all four novels, with each season focusing on one book. The third season aired in 2022, and the release date for the fourth and final season is yet to be announced.

8. Ferrante cannot pinpoint the inspiration for the novel.

My Brilliant Friend’s Italian director, Saverio Costanzo, reportedly faced budget and scheduling constraints, and he almost cut the novel's climactic wedding scene from his adaptation. However, Ferrante, with whom he collaborated via email, is said to have urged him, “Listen, the first image I had when I thought about My Brilliant Friend was a banquet, a very vulgar banquet of Neapolitan life. Please put the banquet back in.”

Costanzo agreed, but he might not have been entirely surprised to learn that his elusive colleague has offered different accounts of how the novel came to be. In an interview, Ferrante confessed that she couldn’t pinpoint the exact origin of the book, mentioning a friend’s death, a wedding, and even her own novel, The Lost Daughter, as potential sparks that would later evolve into the four-part story.

9. A graphic novel version is set for release in October 2023.

Since its screen adaptation, My Brilliant Friend has been reimagined as a graphic novel. This new version, published by Europa Editions, features illustrations by Mara Cerri and text adapted by Chiara Lagani from Ferrante’s original. Ann Goldstein, who translated the novels, also handled the English translation of the graphic novel. It is set to be released in October 2023 and is currently available for preorder.

10. My Brilliant Friend serves as a literary funhouse mirror.

Throughout Ferrante’s work, events and identities seem to reverberate not only within the individual novels but across vast sections of literature. Ferrante herself has said that she “read[s] a lot, but in a disorderly way,” and one can picture her writing as both an organizing and complicating tool as she weaves and reweaves memories, both real and literary.

Elena is the name of the narrator in My Brilliant Friend, as well as the main character’s child in Ferrante’s earlier novel, The Lost Daughter. It also happens to be the first name in her pseudonym, an identity that carries echoes of the Italian author Elsa Morante, whose work Ferrante has consistently praised. From Virgil to Louisa May Alcott, to Lenù and Ferrante herself, writers seem to drift in and out of the novel's margins, influencing both the author and the characters in equal measure.