I once picked up the first novel in Elena Ferrante’s bestselling series, after the very impressive Argentine mother of a dear friend described the books as erotic masterpieces that can never be appreciated in America so long as they have such hideously Victorian book covers. When I abandoned this first attempt to scale the Neopolitan novels, I had more than a thousand pages to go. Thanks to the prologue to My Brilliant Friend, I knew the story ended with two women who have observed each other’s lives with enough attention to recount their own experiences through the story of the other. The rest of what I suspected was confirmed by my many friends who loved the series: despite this mutual, all-consuming obsession, these two ladies never fuck. Reader, I am not proud, but the facts are the facts. I bailed.
I was both relieved and wary when HBO announced the miniseries adaptation of Ferrante’s series. Could my humble, homosexual spirit spelunk safely into the Dantean depths of what has been described as one of the all time best depictions of female friendship? Would I unwillingly emerge from this series converted and cured of homosexuality, spiritually transformed by the platonic power of Elena and Lila’s bond?
As a queer woman, there are choices you have to make to maintain a healthy sense of self-preservation. Sometimes that means your body away from bed on a Wednesday night because that’s the only time the local gay bar has ladies night. And sometimes that means avoiding internationally bestselling series because it’s too unfathomable to imagine 50 years of mutual infatuation where neither party ever even considers the possibility that they might just fuck it out and move on with the damn thing.
how do the straights summon the energy to have so many relationships that are so fundamentally unsatisfying?
Just in case there’s a single person who opens this article who hasn’t read, seen, or browsed the Wikipedia page for My Brilliant Friend, it is the first novel documenting the decades-long friendship of Elena and Lila, two girls from a small town outside of Naples. The story begins in the 1950s when both girls are in grammar school, and the miniseries follows them through adolescence to early adulthood.
Though they are recognized as the two most promising girls in town, Elena is reserved where Lila is bold. She resents her friend’s intuitive brilliance, and she is propelled by her own sense of inferiority to excel through academics. Elena and Lila trade beaus, each more troublesome than the last, and they encourage and challenge each other to write. With the ferocity of animals trapped in cages, they plot their escape from their oppressively provincial village, always with one eye on the other, using men as pawns in their battle to achieve freedom.
Watching this series, I felt a mixture of bewilderment and exhaustion. If true friendships consume this much energy, then I have spent my entire life friendless. I’ve always assumed being gay required a fleeter foot along a trickier path than the one the heterosexuals walk, but how do the straights summon the energy to have so many relationships that are so fundamentally unsatisfying? Every turn of the narrative seemed to reflect upon the story’s unspoken gay tragedy. Elena’s inability to manifest an original thought hampers her studies, and it is also what prevents her from making out with her hot friend. Lila’s mind is more acute to unforeseen possibilities, but the village communist is only able to teach her about the mafia and the black markets, and unfortunately there’s no one in town who can do the same with lesbianism.
These characters spin around each other, allegedly smart, yet also so dumb. Without a helpful homosexual guide like Audre Lorde around to inform these two schemers that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, their plans to escape the patriarchal hold of their hometown are as elaborate as they are futile. Elena toils through years of schooling, Lila plots an elaborate shoe empire, and no one tells them that the fastest way to get permanently exiled from a backwards village is to just go ahead and do something gay. You’ll be in the big city in no time.
In the book, I found that Ferrante’s controlled narration prevented the reader from wandering too far off from Elena’s perspective, which is maybe why I never finished. Spending so much time inside the head of a woman so resolutely heterosexual when it is against her own best interests is against my religion.
But the result of making all of Elena and Lila’s sexual scheming and emotional manipulation visual is that the story’s erotic confusion is endearingly unavoidable. The series is awkward where Ferrante’s writing was sure, the camera pausing sometimes over the character’s lingering gazes as if to say, yeah my dude, I don’t get it either. I wandered inside these character’s heads like an alien discovering a strange planet. What queers these heteros be! But the extent to which I truly could not relate to Elena and Lila’s relationship prompted some soul searching. The series is such a massive phenomenon, resounding so powerfully with so many women I deeply love and respect that it feels incorrect somehow to simply not get it.