My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

22:40Jeff O'Neal:Everything is mediated. She's in a walled garden of her own creation, which is canny for, I think, publishing political reasons and publicity reasons, but really, really smart for her own sanity. Very interesting to, in the course of it, pretty quickly when this thing took off, would-be literary detectives sort of got out their emails. And I don't really want to get into the specifics because I don't really like this myself. I'm not sure how you feel about it, Rebecca, but you can Google it for yourself. But there's at one point, you know, some textual analysis, people going through some tax and like property records, I think was the other way of putting it this.

23:24I land here. I actually don't care. I don't either. I really find myself, I guess if there was a big reveal like Frieda McFadden style tomorrow where she was giving an interview or he or the combo or just I'm using those pronouns to sort of lightly refer to some of the quote unquote findings of these investigations. I guess I would be interested in it, but I would not be. I'm not going to be like rushing to my keyboard and eating that with a fork and spoon and try to do a bunch of gotcha stuff. I find myself interested in the authors for sure. But for this one, I don't know why. I really am like, I think this is pretty cool what Ferrante has done.

24:04I think it adds to the text. And I think we can talk about that when we get into the subject matter. Some fans are really not happy about this. I guess whatever journalistic bone I have in my body, I think it's fair game for someone to try to find out. I feel that as well. But I just don't care. Rebecca, how about you?

24:21Jeff O'Neal:You know, I feel the same way. Like, the folks who have tried to suss it out, and one of them even went so far as writing an investigation that got published in the New York Review of Books back in 2016, really at the height of Ferrante fever. Most of the speculation centers around this married couple, an Italian writer named Domenico Starnoni and his wife, who is an Italian translator named Anita Raja. Okay. Like, okay, there's speculation. Of course there's speculation. Like, I can only imagine the fun that BookTok would have with this today, trying to, you know, suss things out. But Ferrante's fans, like the most diehard of the Ferrante feverites, don't like that this was done.

25:03Jeff O'Neal:And I think that that is really important and kind of unusual that in a lot of cases, and especially today, like if this were to start today, I think readers would be more suspicious because there's a lot of like, why won't you tell us who you are? Is this written by AI? Are you a famous person who maybe like has a bad reputation and you don't want your book to come out and be tainted by that? So you're writing under a different name. Like, writers could do things, these kind of performance art aspects of their identity a little more easily pre-internet. But that even now, most of Ferrante's passionate readers also don't care, don't really want to know.

25:42Jeff O'Neal:I'm super interested in, like, when the writer we know as Elena Ferrante eventually dies. Like, what is in Ferrante's will? Is there going to be a post-death reveal or is it supposed to be locked down and kept secret forever and ever, which I think would be my preference. It does, as you were saying, feed into the text some. I'm not sure what I would gain as a reader if I knew the real Elena Ferrante today. Well, I mean, I think when we were talking to Namali Srapel about Toni Morrison, and I don't remember if it was in that actual episode that made it in our conversation with her afterwards, she was saying, you know, Morrison didn't want a memoir because of, I think, similar kinds of dynamics, to be honest with you.

26:29not exactly the same, but similar. I do think at some point, and certainly Ferrante has passed into this point, where she is part of world literary history. And eventually, I think that trumps, it could be after they die, it could be death plus 75, or whatever the, you know, the law is in Italy about copyright or intellectual property. I'm fine to adhere to all those things. But at some point, it enters the historical record and historical memory and just the history of literature and culture and whatever, and it's worth knowing, and it will matter in some degrees. I still don't think we know how it matters, but it does matter.

27:06But for now, for this moment, for this particular reading experience, for me, I don't know what I would get it. I do love something Ferrante said in multiple interviews. There's a really good Paris Review interview if you happen to have a Paris Review subscription or want to pony up for them. The Art of Fiction stuff they do, just if you like this show, it's worth giving them a few bucks. I would regularly recommend it. You could, there's a whole bunch there. But I think there really is something to, it does force you back to the text. And as you know, Rebecca, I am always in favor of that. I'm always in favor of, if there's no person to go to, you have to sort of refer to the text.

27:43And you can go back to it over and over again. So I think that's very interesting to think about that. With an added layer of fun for that here, that the writer chose the pseudonym Elena.

27:54Jeff O'Neal:and the main character of this book, who is a writer, is also named Elena. That's just good fun. That's just good sport on Ferrante's part, I would say. How many master's theses have been written about that already? Yeah. You mentioned your first exposure before, and this is it. This is it. Anything else you want to say about why this is it or, you know, before we get into the actual reading of it? I'm so jealous of the people who read this in the moment that it was fresh. I texted a friend whose taste I really know and trust. I was like, do you have a take on Ferrante? And her response was, I have no take.

28:27Jeff O'Neal:I only have a feeling. And that feeling is love. And love was in all caps. And I can totally see from this reading experience how that happened for people when you just were early in the hype and the book was being passed from hand to hand with that real power of word of mouth. And I am sad that that experience is not available to me. Like, the closest I can get here is trying to understand how and why it happened. But it's so hard to get outside of the kind of expectation that's created by this book was voted best book of the century so far by a bunch of critics. and you add that to the hype and it's not that long ago and I'm not sitting by the pool just reading this on my own I'm reading this with a pen in my hand to do a show like this and trying to analyze and look at the text so I think I had as good of an experience with it as I could have in in this context but I am I like so envious of the people who just got to read it and have their socks knocked off and sit on a beach with their best friend and a glass of wine and talk about it for a while.

29:42Jeff O'Neal:I wish that I could have participated in that. Do you think if you read it in 2013, do you think you would have been a convert? Do you think you would have carried the banner? Oh, that's a good question. I don't think so. I think I would have liked it, but maybe not loved it, which is where I landed, to be perfectly frank, that's where I landed here. I really appreciated it, but it didn't ring all of my personal bells, and I think that's just idiosyncratic reading taste. I don't find childhood to be that interesting. This is a great take. It's a wonderful take. And I don't have any nostalgia for the 10 to 16 years, those ages that we're seeing these girls in.

30:25Jeff O'Neal:And I wondered if the readers who really connected to this had more affection for that time of their lives. Like, I couldn't wait to grow up and get out. If I write a novel, it's not going to be about the glories of girlhood and young friendship. Like, you're going to find me in the mid-30s where female friendship gets really magical. So it just wasn't for me. Yeah, I read it in 2013, 2014, right around there, just to see what the deal was. I have a little bit more of wanting to see what the deal is, Jean, than you do, though sometimes we do this together. But especially when it's something like this, I couldn't help it.

30:59Though not my struggle, which I've never gotten to, which is a subject for a different day. I don't know why that.

31:04Jeff O'Neal:It's a much bigger commitment to make. Yeah, it is a bigger book. And I landed almost exactly where you said you thought you would have landed 2013, which I really liked it. The twin of that is then if you really like this and see the hype, that part is a little mystifying. Mystifying is not the right word. I think I get it. I think my head gets it, but my gut doesn't. I don't follow the people off to storm the castle. for this. It's like, I see why people are mad. Overthrowing the government seems like a good idea. But you know what? I'm good. I think I'll be fine if I just take it here. I think that really articulates how I experienced it, that intellectually, I get it.

31:41Jeff O'Neal:I did not feel a lot of things about this book. Yeah. I mean, if you'd have given me, I don't know, 50 books coming out in 2012, and you told me one of these books, this is going to happen to it. if I put it in my top 25, I would be shocked. I just would be shocked. Now, there's some reasons for that. You just can't guess. Nobody ever knows what the next big thing is going to be. But even giving a smaller sample size is what I'm saying. I still think I would have had time picking that. And I do think part of it is gender. I think that's an important thing just to get into the world for me, at least, is like, I get it, but I don't have the same kind of dynamics here.

32:18And maybe we can talk about them together, but certainly give it over to you because that's what this is all about. This is about being a girl, a young woman in this particular time and place, which is for an American, I think is a little harder to parse because the dynamics of this neighborhood are pretty freaking wild, to be perfectly honest with you. But then, you know, Elena, the character has this, we'll use the word friend. I think one of my interpretations, one of my analyses, one of my offerings to listeners about this book is that one thing the book is trying to articulate is what is Lila?

32:53What is she to Elena? Because friend doesn't do it, right? And I think we all have people in our lives that friend just doesn't quite capture. It's like, it's not a love story, though I think there's a part of that that happens here. But there's some other relationship that either an Italian or Neapolitan, as they're talking in dialect sometimes, or English or German or whatever. However, there's these other, the varieties of the way we can be in relationship to each other is still not completely mapped. And I think if people are reacting to anything in Ferrante, I think it's that. It's like, yes, I see this dynamic and I understand.

33:28And I'm so interested in seeing you through the lens of this young girl who is also coming into her own awareness, who is thinking about it manifestly, right? She is thinking about this as a 12-year-old, which maybe that would happen. Maybe it doesn't, really doesn't matter. the reality of his immaterial. I feel along with you that there is something here to be mined. And I think that's the thing, Rebecca. I think that's the white, the spinning molten core of this phenomenon.

33:55Jeff O'Neal:Yeah. To borrow from Gatsby, Lila and Linu are simultaneously enchanted and repelled by each other. There's this magnetism that especially Elena feels coming from Lila. She's really drawn to her and their friendship. It's ride or die in a lot of ways, but it's also so conflicted. They compete with each other and they sharpen each other. Trying to keep up with Lila is what first gives Elena a real glimpse of the possibilities for herself that education might open up. They admire each other. They resent each other. There's this super enmeshed, passionate, codependent quality to the friendship that does ring incredibly true.

34:37Jeff O'Neal:I remember feeling this way about a friend when I was that age. And the fear that that relationship is going to fade, because you're coming of age. A lot of things change between the ages of 10 and 16, and they're both so conscious of it, or Elena is conscious of it, as she's telling us this, she's like hyper-tuned into my friend is going this way and I might be going this other way. And what's going to happen? I don't want to lose her because this friendship feels like so deep and so essential in some way. But Elena's just, she's so compelled by it. She says like that Lila knew how to be autonomous, whereas I needed her.

35:17Jeff O'Neal:I wanted her to be curious, to want at least a little to share my adventure from the outside, to feel she was losing something of me as I always feared losing much of her. There's just all this anxiety about, does my friend love me in the same way that I love her and as much as I love her? What's going to happen to this friendship if it turns out that maybe we're not the same? And that differentiation between them is one of the big revelations that Elena has through the course of the book. And then we see, I think, near the end of this book, like, oh, maybe they are going to stay connected to each other.

35:51Jeff O'Neal:But that tension of being drawn to someone else for all the ways that they're different from you, but those differences are also the source of the greatest insecurity in the relationship. Lila's really rebellious and bold, and Elena is a pretty do-it-by-the-book schoolgirl. She's more disciplined. I mean, I think that's one thing that eventually that Lila seems to understand later in the book is that Lila actually sees some things in her that she admires. And that's a real turning point for her at the same time. I'm not always just second fiddle, right? I'm not existing. I'm not the moon just reflecting whatever she's doing as the sun.

36:29And that becomes an interesting that they are different and that she can see her difference in similarities and start to get some differentiation at the same time. One of the factors here is one of the reasons they're sort of banging against each other is there's a certain affinity for sure that's natural. They're both smart. They're both interested in reading and they're interested in school and a time and a place which is not that interested in girls being interested in education. We are not experts in what sort of the life of working class Italian neighborhoods was like in 1955, to be sure.

37:00But as a reader coming to it, Rebecca, I think one thing we can see for sure is this is hostile to their selfhood. Like this environment is hostile to their selfhood. Because the other thing they're seeing, it's like, you know that the recommendation like if you're drowning or if you see someone drowning you need to throw them a rope or a you know a life jacket don't go save them yourself because they'll take you down with it my sense of this is they're in this ocean and all there are each other and they're just sort of clinging to each other like both trying not to drown at the same time and it's not if they're if at points they're submerging the other person it's not out of malice it's just trying to keep their own head above water in that moment and that kind of thrashing that code of codependency, that existential, like, it's a question of survival, I think, in a very real way in this particular book.

37:48Jeff O'Neal:I think that's right. There's this, like, desperate quality in so many different senses of the word desperate to their friendship and clinging. I'm really glad you used that word as well, because there is that, like, just holding on for dear life to the one person who gets it, even when they don't totally get it, even when they hurt you, even when your devotion to them is not equally returned. And they do, like Elena talks about how it's this big, noisy, violent world. It feels like it's a really masculine world that they're in. Boys and men are sources of fear and danger and violence. Casual violence.

38:28Very casual. Yes.

38:30Jeff O'Neal:Emotional violence and physical violence. There is sexual violence in the book. And that Elena starts to use education to carve her own way out of it. Meanwhile, Leela, is crafting the best life that she can within that world. And even that tension of, well, I'm trying to escape this. So what does it mean that she's chosen to stay? And how do you resolve that difference is really key to it. At the end of the first book, Lila has sort of made the compromise they both fear and find alluring, which is to marry one of these, I don't know, higher in the food chain suitors who all kind of suck by the way they know there's not a really good choice here whereas elena is still upwardly mobile in the educational system there's some sense that maybe there's something else even if it's being a stationer like i don't know why you need so much latin to be a stationer but that's kind of all her she and her family could imagine for a woman's professional life at this time and place whereas lila ends in this big wedding ceremony, which is a kind of capitulation.

39:33And then the ending sort of metaphor doubles down on, I don't know that she's getting out of this bargain. Even the compromise she's making is not going to yield what she thinks the compromise is going to yield. But I think it's so interesting that we get a frame story that Lila eventually is going to, at least for a moment, stage a disappearance, right? She's going to evaporate into the world. She's going to be on her own, even without Elena, or even without her telling her. And they've drifted apart. It seems like they've come back and forth over time, maybe a little bit. But this is not the end of the story.

40:10So it does have a propulsive quality. This is where these characters are going to end up at some point. And to see them bounce off of each other in that way is pretty interesting. I guess we haven't talked much about the actual reading experience, it has really, this is always a problem with translation. I don't know what it would be like to read this in Italian. I can't say. It's pretty straightforward, except when it isn't. I think the most exciting moments are when you are seeing, you're hearing, you're listening in on Elena thinking about Lila. Those are the moments where Ferrante, the author's powers of observation and powers of articulation and insight are really powerful and exciting.

40:50And then a lot of it is narrating the day-to-day life. There's not a plot. This is coming of age. We're going through grade by grade, and there's boyfriends and seasides, and we get some assaults and just the things that we're going through. But like the characters themselves, we do not get a sense of a grand plan, an overarching narrative, trying to get from here to there. It is a much more of how are they... We know they're going to make it into their 60s. We know they're going to survive in that way. But what is life going to do with them? How are they going to survive it? And then, of course, what do they mean to each other and how does that change over time?

41:22How did you find the actual paragraph by paragraph reading experience, Rebecca?

41:26Jeff O'Neal:You know, I found myself just sort of caught up in the flow of it because it is just daily life. And that also meant that there were times where I was like, wait, which boyfriend is this? Oh, it's important. We'll get this office hours, but wow. Yeah. There are like four pages of cast and characters at the start of the book, which maybe just don't do that to us. Like I'm intimidated from the jump when the first thing that I encounter in a book is here's who's in this and it's three pages of names that are, they're hard to track. And I think some of that is intentional that like the fellas are just, you know, supporting characters at best, kind of NPCs really in this book.

42:09Jeff O'Neal:And like, you can kind of swap them in and out as different, like almost paper dolls of like that boyfriend didn't do it. So let's try this other boyfriend. And maybe not him. Okay, this one has some possibilities. But there's just like people's mean dads and people's mean brothers. And then your own mean boyfriends are sort of all over the place. Even the villains are kind of interchangeable weirdly. Sometimes like who did what to whom? I know something bad happened, but which one was it? I would find myself being like, I don't really care about this. But then once Elena and Lilo were back together and they were, you know, trying to like skip school and go off to the seaside for the day and have an adventure.

42:44Jeff O'Neal:Those moments I felt really invested in. I really admired the language. There are some just stop you in your tracks moments of observation that, for me, made the whole thing worth it. And I did find myself curious to read the next three. I don't know when I'll actually get to that, but I am more curious about what happens to these women as they grow up. What happens between 16 when this book ends and 60 when Leela goes missing? I would like to experience Ferrante writing about adult womanhood. Yeah, I would like to get them to eventually there. It's not really a hot take, but I kind of feel like I get what it's about.

43:25You know, I think this is the acorn that will become the oak tree. But you can see a little bit in miniature what's there at the same time. It's clearly about money and class two at the same time. Like they'll turn a corner and be out of their depth in terms of how much money and what kind of signification is going around on around cars and clothes and speech.

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45:05Official sponsor of FIFA World Cup 26. I, oh, let's go! So I think that's something else the girls are certainly feeling, if not able to express directly. Like, they realize their little sort of corner of the world is a panopticon. But, you know, this is one of those old questions. Like, is that safer than going out into the great unknown where you really don't have the tools to navigate the world? At least you know where the demons are in your neighborhood is a really fascinating element to this, for sure.

45:32Jeff O'Neal:I thought Ferrante really very masterfully captured that the simultaneous excitement and terror and the uncertainty of growing up. Like it's exciting and you're discovering things, but also, oh, my God, what's out there in the world? There's a summer where Elena, like Elena's teacher intervenes to just like help her get away for the summer. She gets to go to Ischia. Secret MVP. Save it for the office hours. Yeah. Yeah. But she goes to Ischia, which is an island off of Naples, for the summer. And she writes there like, I blossomed outside of all of the constraints of family and expectations and away from all of these people that she's known her entire life.

46:10Jeff O'Neal:Something new happens and she discovers herself and the world opens up for her. And that also helps generate and increase the tension that she feels with Lila because Lila is reinvesting in the community that they have come from. And her roots are only getting deeper. She's marrying somebody that they've known their whole lives and she's going to stay in town. And Elena's starting to look for what can I do to get out? Can you actually write a book and get rich and leave? Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I think I'm going to do a couple of connective tissue things here a little bit, like thinking of the ultimate disappearance, which seems to be the goal, right?

46:50Like Lila's transcendence into her own existence that's completely separate from anyone's perception of her is something that she's trying to figure out a way to be in the world through this. Can I master the form? Like, that's what she's really doing at the end of this wedding. Can I be so good at negotiating and performing what's expected of me that I can find freedom within that? There's even this one place where there's this cycle of like almost like godfather-like retribution. If someone does something, then you fight back and forth and so on and so forth. And something happens where she sort of convinces her fiance, Stefano, not to participate in that, just ignore that it's happening.

47:27And Elena's like, and the whole community is mystified. What do you mean they're not going to take umbrage and cut them when they see them or do something else? And Elena's like, I think they found some other way of being in the world. And Stefano doesn't seem like can ultimately keep that up. But Lila is going through, I would anticipate her going through stages of looking for how she can be in the world and be in herself. And I can't help but connect it to that Ferrante's own anonymous writing. It's like, this is what Lila would do were she. Maybe she becomes a novelist in the book for all that I know.

48:00This is what she is seeking to make the thing, be in the world, but not be subject to everyone's bullshit all the time. And also, who among us? Right. Yeah. Yeah.

48:11Jeff O'Neal:Who among us, indeed. The book is so good at capturing so many dynamics. And I do think that's what makes Ferrante really magical, that there's that struggle to either gild your own cage, as Lila is, or to somehow escape it, and how they're both negotiating that in the ways that money and class and access to education inform it. But there's also this, speaking of the guys all being kind of interchangeable, there's this like age-old dynamic that she captures of a sparkly woman who's just settling for a dude who doesn't deserve her. And Elena remarks that of Lila and her husband, Lila gave off an energy that couldn't be ignored.

48:50Jeff O'Neal:He seemed a faded little man. And I feel like this is it. I've been alive long enough. I have seen this happen a lot, that there are negotiations and compromises that especially women have to make or feel that they have to make in trying to get out of the circumstances that they came from. And so much of this book is concerned with what does it mean to want something more than the circumstances you grew up in? And what does it cost you to try to get that something more? because it definitely costs something. And you don't even know what that thing is. Like it's, you don't even, you can't, it's not like there's even a goal.

49:25They don't have a role model of some way to be in the world. And I think that's what they find. So, I don't know, two steps forward, one step back about relating to each other is that they're each creating in the form of the other person, their ideal or their goal, right? I'm going to get post-structural. I don't remember much from my theoretical days of post-structuralism. But Jacques Lacan, who is a post-Freudian psychoanalyst, who was really influential in literary theory, at least in the 90s and 2000s. I don't know. Maybe he's been tossed to the gutter. But one thing I remember is this thing called the Lacanian mirror stage, this theory of like when you're little, like kids, like 6 to 18 months.

50:00Now, remember, there's a lot of evidence for some of these post-structuralist ideas. So take of them what you will, I think one teacher said to me. But this idea that at some point, when you see other people in the mirror stages, is like you see a version of yourself that looks more unified and capable and internally consistent than you feel. And what does that do? And I've even used this in an example with my own kids as they go through adolescence, like this is a really difficult time. You're trying to figure out there's a lot going on inside of you. It's going to feel fractious and contradictory.

50:31You're not going to know the way. One thing I don't want you to feel like is that that is unusual. And I want you to try to think about that that same thing you're feeling, versions of it are not only happening in your peer group, but it happening pretty much everyone all the time, right? That this is a thing that is just true and it can be very helpful and to get your head screwed on right. And so this is the little con. The body in pieces finds its unity in the image of the other or of its own specular image or sort of some ideal of yourself that you're trying to grow. Like that's kind of a fake it till you make it idea.

51:02But this idea that one thing you do when you're in the world is like look at everyone and look at everything around there. And much like, you know, the storytelling animal, humans use stories to give order to disorder. We use the ideal or the theory that, well, other people must be internally consistent and happy and know what's going on. Ergo, if I don't, there's something wrong with me. And if I don't, I also shouldn't say that at the same time. And I just that struck me again here to think about it as a useful way in.

51:29Jeff O'Neal:And they have some conversations that sort of get at that. It's especially around their bodies. And I don't want to get out of this section of the show without talking about how well Ferrante captures all the stuff of bodies at this moment in life, like early adolescence, the magic, the power, the danger of being in a female body, the worries about being attractive enough, the worries about being too attractive, the desire to take up space, the desire to not take up too much space. And Elena watches Leela negotiate this a whole lot. Like, is she shrinking herself too much for what she's going to get out of the deal?

52:07Jeff O'Neal:And what does that mean then for Elena about how she wants to occupy space? But they don't really grasp that everybody feels as mixed up as they individually feel. but it is also that's just part of it. When you're that age, you haven't lived long enough to know that that's true. Really, really good, important stuff there. And I think this is your note too, that the reversal of My Brilliant Friend, as you're reading, you just assume, and I think it's sort of is Elena thinking of Lila as her brilliant friend, but Lila actually utters that term about Elena towards it. Like that, the title comes out of her mouth, which is a pretty interesting reversal, right?

52:45Like they're both doing this thing, but we are in Elena's point of view. So of course we think that because that's what she thinks. It may not be true. It's not a magic, it's slight of narrative hand to get us to, our sympathy is there and so towards our vision, of course.

52:59Jeff O'Neal:Yeah. And that they each, to go back to what you're saying, each of them feels this way about the other one, that this person is brilliant and the kind of the center of my universe. And we've gotten 300 pages of Elena writing about Lila, but for Lila to look at Elena and be like, you're my brilliant friend. You've got to go and be better than everybody else. Like, make us proud, girl, is kind of what's going on there. I really enjoyed that. There was just some facade of like, oh, that's fun. I see what you did here, Elena Ferrante. Yeah. One more thing before we get into straight thoughts territory.

53:29I might hold the specificities of these as an advance to let people experience them themselves. But there is an ending grace note metaphor, almost like O 'Henry-like moment around some shoes that I don't think, I think resist a simple reading. And I'll just offer that to people. And maybe we can do that in office hours or somewhere else. I think it's worth going into that not knowing. Typically, spoilers I don't care about, but I don't want to cloud someone's interpretive or, I don't know, yeah, the sort of interpretive moment where they get to that thing, except to say that it exists.

54:00Jeff O'Neal:Yeah. I wondered when I got there if I was going to open this doc today and see a Jeff moment of that's what literature is metaphor. Let's talk about the shoes. If it was in the middle, we would definitely be spending some time. Do a little soul searching, if you would. Anyway, sorry, no puns. It is worth mentioning that the subtitle of the largest chunk of the book is the story of the shoes. There's a lot of, well, that's what gets into straight thoughts. I guess that's, we can pick around, but like, this is really fascinating about, the shoe is interesting, because it's, only an Italian would write a book where handmade shoes are so important.

54:39That was my stray thought about this.

54:41Jeff O'Neal:I was really wondering if there's an alternate universe where this book comes out contemporaneously with book talk being big and we get a totally different book talk. What if my brilliant friend had been the defining first book talk hit instead of the Colleen Hoover books? Well, even something like We Who Have Never Known Men might be a little bit closer tonally and sort of – I haven't read that book. But it's more interested in this level of discourse, I think, than the Colleen Hoover sort of situation. Yeah, I Who Have Never Known Men did come up when I was Googling around for people who like this book also like these others.

55:21Is it I Who Have Never Known Men? I Who Have Never Known Men?

55:23Jeff O'Neal:I think it's I Who Have Never Known Men. Okay. I didn't do my Googling. That's off to the top of the down here. Where else do you want to go? You've got a bunch. I've got a bunch. We can go in whatever we want. To go back to what I was saying in my own experience of it, I found it really fascinating that this book makes so many people nostalgic for their childhoods. When Elena tells us in the text explicitly that she feels no nostalgia for hers and Lila's because it was so violent. And that's a fascinating trick that Ferrante is able to pull off. Do you think she's trying to pull out? I agree with you.

55:54I almost feel like that's a misreading. Well, I don't want to say anyone else's reading is wrong. This is not how great it was to be friends together in the 50s. That's not what this book is about.

56:03Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, no, I agree. It's very complex. This is not, you know, one of those, this is not a simple, straightforward friendship story. It's something much more than that. Yeah. I want a word for this type of friend or this type of friendship. We need one. Like, Elena describes Lila as an essence not only seductive but dangerous emanated from her. She was like that. She threw things off balance just to see if she could put them back some other way. She's magnetic and rebellious and dangerous and you're drawn to her, but it's hard to be close to her. And like, maybe the Germans have a word for this.

56:35Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, I don't know. I need some succinct way to capture that dynamic. I had the same thing. I wish I would have cataloged all the unusual ways Elena describes Lila. And that's where the Elena becomes interestingly smushed accordion style. Like it's both Ferrante and the character doing it, right? Because obviously it's the writer, but it's in the mind of Elena. Yeah, it's just a corny copia of unusual phrases that are elusive and elusive. Here's just one example. The need for glasses intensified my mania for finding a pattern that, as in good and evil, would bind my fate and hers. I was blind.

57:09She a falcon. I had an opaque pupil. She narrowed her eyes. With darting glances that saw more, I clung to her arm among the shadows. She guided me with a stern gaze. Okay, I can't help myself. One more example. I thought again of that wonderful passage of the letter of the cracked and crumpled copper. It was an image that I used all the time whenever I noticed a fracture in her or in me. I knew in M dashes, perhaps I hoped that no form could ever contain Lila and that sooner or later she would break everything again. If that it's not friendship. I mean, it is and it's not. So I agree with you completely.

57:46What's being what's being groped for here is some way to articulate this feeling. And that's cool. It's as fun as I can have trying to do a close reading or pay attention to language.

57:58Jeff O'Neal:It's really cool. And it opens itself up for so much interpretation and digging. And as many popular raves of these books have been read, there's a ton of scholarship on them. And for books that are only 12 or 14 years old, which is really interesting. My last big stray thought was, good job, Elena. Look to marry the dude who can hang with you intellectually. She's had this like string of bad boyfriends and she's not looking to get married near the end of this book, but she's talking to a fella who can actually hold a conversation with her. And she says, I was dazzled instead by the way Nino talked to me without any subservience, that he's not afraid of her, that he's not dumbing things down for her, but that he seems to at least be the closest that anyone has gotten so far to recognizing and respecting her intellect.

58:49I was thinking about higher stakes weddings because the end wedding here does feel like a really tough hang. Like there's a bit of larceny in the hearts of all the attendees. So I'm thinking like the wedding in The Godfather, the red wedding, and then the ending of Ferrante's wedding. Those are my top three literary wedding scenes.

59:06Jeff O'Neal:It most reminded me of the fishes episode of The Bear. Oh, yeah. You can definitely see that. I think what's maybe different is that there's almost like a Greek chorus element to the wedding attendees. They're not really specific. They're ready to cut someone's head off because their chicken Kiev came out late or something. I don't really understand those stuff. They're at least contending that some of the tables have better food and wine than other tables do, which was a big open question for me. Did that actually happen? Right. Is everybody just is everybody so nervous about their position and like relative to everyone else that you're concerned that maybe somebody got better food than you did.

59:46As the ultimate negotiator of the extent, I don't think Lila would have allowed that to happen unless she did it on purpose for some reason. But I can't quite get that. And then it's also worth noting, again, as 21st century Americans, pardon me, good Lord, you have to acknowledge, but you won't understand the moving between formal Italian and Neapolitan and different uses of it. Like it's noted. I think that's all you need to know. But it is a marker of class and ethnic difference. And it's a signal of hierarchy. And who can switch between it and who doesn't need to and who does is meaningful, but a little beyond my ken to offer real signpost for what it might mean there.

1:00:27I shudder to look at I didn't look at the number one Goodreads quote. Rebecca, what is it?

1:00:32Jeff O'Neal:It's kind of a head-scratcher. The number one Goodreads quote is, children don't know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow. Everything is this now. The street is this. The doorway is this. The stairs are this. This is mama. This is papa. This is the day. This is the night. That's a real strange one to do. I don't even remember this sentence. I don't remember this phrase. Yeah, no. And I went through reading the book kind of hoping I would hit a line where I was like, oh, that's obviously going to be the Goodreads line or that's the obvious Ferrante tattoo line.

1:01:05Jeff O'Neal:And I couldn't pick one out. I think that's exactly it. That's why this is the number one quote on Goodreads, because there is no, Lila sure was a friend of mine, or she was the thing that got me through the dark Naples nights. It's not that. It's just it resists any kind of straightforward live, laugh, love pillow, which is fascinating. Really fascinating. What else did you mark? Let's see. Elena describing Lila's bad girlness as every disobedient act contained breathtaking opportunities. Like one of the attractions of this friendship is you get to break some rules if you're friends with Lila, or at least you get to be adjacent to rule breaking.

1:01:44Jeff O'Neal:And that can be exciting and it can make it seem like life is opening up in a new way. I loved the, I think maybe my favorite stretch of the book is when the girls skip school for a day and they're trying to go see the seaside. They've never been to the ocean. The little side quest for a pair here. And they've got to go through this long tunnel and they think they're going to make it. And Elena reflects, when I think of the pleasure of being free, I think of the start of that day of coming out of the tunnel and finding ourselves on a road that went straight as far as the eye could see. the road that according to what Reno had told Lila, if you got to the end, arrived at the sea.

1:02:19Jeff O'Neal:I felt joyfully open to the unknown. The one I was going to guess, the most single moving line to me that felt maybe the most on the nose is something that Lila says to Lina, which towards the end, where I think they're going to go tell Marcello, which is the scarier of the couple of suitors that actually she's not married, Lila's not Lila's not marrying her and she says Eleni you have to come with me and then Lila says Lila says to her do you remember how many things we've done that scared you I waited for you on purpose I mean that is great shit that's like don't you want a Sancho Panza a Robin or your own Batman where if you link arms you can go tell the scary pseudo mob guy that you were gonna marry to go stick it where the sun don't shine And wouldn't it feel good as a 15-year-old of any gender for someone to say, I just need you to do this scary thing?

1:03:19I mean, isn't that what we always want at some level? Yeah.

1:03:23Jeff O'Neal:And also this. We were 12 years old, but we walked along the hot streets of the neighborhood amid the dust and flies that the occasional old trucks stirred up as they passed. Like two old ladies taking the measure of our lives of disappointment, clinging tightly to each other. No one understood us. Only we, too, I thought, understood one another. like isn't that interesting too like this is a phenomenon i think especially of teenagers but it can it can remain past there that not no one understanding you can be like a self-fulfilling prophecy and then also like a self-fulfilling source of differentiation and identity like is to be under some people think to be understood as being to become square i think at some level to become uninteresting to become normative but it's not in that moment i guess the question i'm trying to ask, they're so enriched by their own relationship that could they be understood in that moment?

1:04:19Could they snap their fingers? Would they do it? Would they do it? Would they break out of this bubble of mutual sort of protection and identity even if they could? And I don't know. And that can become an anti-pattern in a lot of different ways.

1:04:32Jeff O'Neal:Yeah. And like, of course you can't. Like it doesn't, it's just not possible to be understood by everyone. And that's what makes a friendship like this so addictive. That somebody gets me, somebody sees it and really understands. And the shine of that never goes away. That remains really special forever. And if you're lucky enough, like these girls are, to have somebody who's friends with you for 50 years, I can only imagine what that feels like. My oldest friend And now, like my oldest friendship with another woman is like 20 years in. And how profound that feels to be like we were kids who knew no things when we became friends with each other.

1:05:13Jeff O'Neal:And we have gone through relationships and marriages and divorces and like parents' illnesses and all that stuff of the world and morphed in so many different ways. But we can still link arms and I can still be like, dude, does it feel this way to you? Do you know what that feeling is and that she does is incredible? And Ferrante, here's the biggest unanswerable question. Who is Elena Ferrante's best friend that inspired this kind of writing? Because I think you have to know this by feeling to be able to write about it this well. Or have seen it or have imagined it. Like, I don't know. I'm always less sure than others about it has to have been real.

1:05:53I think it could have been some version or seen something. I could believe it. I will not underestimate the imaginative arts and say that you have to have done it to actually have felt it. But that's easily wrong. I think that part of what made this book so resonant for women was the feeling that Ferrante gets it, that she must have felt this thing that I've felt.

1:06:15Jeff O'Neal:And so maybe that's a little wish casting on my part is like, surely she must know this experience. But this more, I usually fall closer to where you are. People can do research and they can imagine things, but there's something about this that, for me, resists that. It feels lived to me. I agree. My Bayesian prior would be that it is based on something, but you know me. I really don't want to come down on certainty. Certainty, I'm sure, is not something that generally comes out of my mouth. A couple more things for me. I was just thinking, it's funny you mentioned that the Germans have to have a phrase with it.

1:06:49In Kurt Vonnegut's book, Mother Night, which is about, I hope I'm going to get this right. I'm not looking it up as we go. Basically, a member of the Nazi party who is essentially a traitor or a spy. He's not part of it. He's there to undermine whatever's going on. And only he and his wife know that. And it's about them living their life in this pocket, right? And they use this phrase, des Reich des Ves, which in German means the empire of two. And that seems like maybe that's close to, it's a romantic relationship. But this is our own little world, right? Where we make the rules and we adjudicate and we're not subject to other people.

1:07:27Of course, it can't be an empire of two. Or as Achilles says in book nine of the Iliad, be king equally with me. Trying to find some new language for a different kind of understanding here. But I waited for you on purpose is pretty good. It's good stuff. Good stuff. Let's see. Here's another Ferranti doing Ferranti things of trying to articulate the inarticulable. I'll try to summarize it using the language of today like this. There are no gestures, words, or sighs that do not contain the sum of all the crimes that humans have committed and commit. like i know what saying there's special providence in the fall of a sparrow is one thing saying like all the all the wrongness of the world is in your sort of like non-verbal gestures i i don't know what to do with that rebecca do you have any take on that particular no like what i had marked this

1:08:19Jeff O'Neal:in my notes as well and when i was prepping for the show i looked at it like five times i was like i don't actually know what to say about this other than to point at it and be like isn't that something. And maybe that also is an important part of this reading experience. And one of the things that enchants people about it is that there are parts that just resonate, that feel true, even if you can't articulate exactly why. In that Paris Review interview, I believe Ferrante talks about how she, until she was in her late teens or maybe even 20s, she couldn't imagine a story that wasn't told from the male point of view.

1:08:55And I'm wondering if one thing she's looking at is how to imbue, not to imbue because it's already there, how to excavate, expose, mine, or otherwise celebrate women's experience, especially at this moment, which was not cause for celebration or the epic or investigation, which connects to this other quote I have here. In short, wealth that existed in the facts of every day and so was without splendor and without glory. but everything is so loaded, I guess, right? If all of human history results in that glance you gave to someone at the beach and you were seeing if they saw that you saw that you saw that they were there, that's a great scene in this particular too.

1:09:35All of the things that have been done to women, for example, are manifest somehow in that moment. And Ferrante's interested in excavating that.

1:09:44Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, that's a great way of putting it. And my last fave quote, how sweet everything is, I thought, when the day is fine and every good thing seems to be waiting for you alone. And like, if you've been to Italy and seen that sunlight, like I was actually on Ischia a couple of years ago and a friend I was traveling with was like, oh, this is where she comes in, my brilliant friend. And like that, like the light is good and the water is refreshing. And like, what more do you want? Yeah, what more do you want? Speaking of Vonnegut, he says every now and again, if you say, if this isn't fine, what is?

1:10:19Jeff O'Neal:Yep. two kv shouts today that must be a sign of something unexpected vonnegut coming up there we go uh is this for you rebecca why might this be for you i mean i think if you want all the ingredients of a beach read with the smarts and flair of a literary novel can i press you why why is even a beach read thing here i guess i don't get that why is this a beach read even orthogonally I mean, all the like.

1:11:11Jeff O'Neal:I don't tend to go for, you know, like airport popcorn books. And I could picture myself wanting to read this in a moment like that where you can you can stay engaged and also just have like the story is interesting enough, but the language will stop you in your tracks at moments. Yeah, I'm not I'm not saying you're wrong. I just that's not I get some people do say that it's kind of out there, but I'm just not seeing it because if this is said in, say, Budapest in 1957, no one's calling it a B-treat, I don't think. Yeah, I do think the Italy of it all has a big impact. It's meaningful that we can picture them in Naples where the light is good and they're near the water.

1:11:46And they're eating pizza and ice cream.

1:11:48Jeff O'Neal:Right, right. And they're laying on the beach going like, you know, I'm in this suit that I'm not so sure I look good in. And I heard that the guy I like is going to show up and I'm holding my book, but I can't pay attention to my book because this guy is walking by. Yeah, yeah. Maybe not. If you're more of a plot reader, there's not a plot here. Outside the two main characters, it can be confusing to keep everybody straight. There's sort of like background characters in a George Seurat painting. Like you can sort of make them out, but boy, you really got a split and maybe they don't matter. I had a really hard time thinking about notes for office hours of like, what am I going to say about the characters who aren't Elena and Lilo?

1:12:23Well, we'll just talk about the characterization strategy and what might be going on there a little bit. And I think if you want or need characters to be good and or bad, likable and or hateable. like both even we no one is just one thing we're not joe march i mean little women get shouted a lot of times but we don't get a joe march we do that's not who these women are and a that's not who women are i guess i think is probably one thing ferrante is arguing here um so if you're looking a little bit more for something like that then maybe you'll be like i can't why didn't they just say that or i can't believe they didn't do that or everything sucks like yes i know that's the point.

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1:14:14You'll have the confidence to keep building. Apply today and earn a welcome offer of$1 ,500 cash back after you spend$50 ,000 in qualifying purchases on your new card within the first six months of card membership. Terms apply. Learn more at go.mx.graphite. I think we're ready for the immortal questions that are asked. Which of these are primary here? What is the good life? What do I owe my neighbor? How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? What's the deal with good and evil? Free will, real or no?

1:14:47Jeff O'Neal:Hmm. What is the good life? How do I know what I know? And is this all there is? Really big ones. But the first two are really intertwined with each other. that Elena and Lila are trying to figure out what the good life is or what the best life available to them is. And at the same time, Elena, as she's coming of age, is also trying to figure out if the things that she feels she knows or that she's beginning to understand about herself and her community and the world, are those things true? Or are those her perception? And what does Lila know? What do other people feel? Like, what's real about this world?

1:15:30Yeah. I don't remember. I don't know the order of these things to come out, so I won't spoil it. But in another recording we were doing, I was sort of adding the parenthetical to what do I owe my neighbor? The parenthetical being who is my neighbor, right? So like trying to figure out who in the world do I care about? Who should I care about? How do they affect me? We've been circling around adding another one. I think I will initiate it here or at least entered into the record as a possibility. Who am I and who are my people? that is nested within that is also how did we get here? Who are we?

1:16:03Where are we going? And I think that's maybe one. I think my brilliant friend is charting new terrain or untrod terrain for central questions, especially that maybe women are asking in this moment in many different kinds of cultures. But I also think we are thinking about differently, about non-family, non-political, chosen, found family relationships that are troubling the normal pathways of affinity. And that seems to be something that's very... So I'm going to... What do you think about adding that? Oh, yeah. I approve.

1:16:35Jeff O'Neal:Bang the gavel. Are we sure this isn't about art and writing? That's a hilarious question. These girls love books together. They write things together. One of them is a writer. As you said, little women gets name-checked multiple times. But so does the Iliad. So does the Odyssey. So do a bunch of the classics. It's just 1 million percent about the impact of other people's art and writing on you and then the impact of your own expressive art and writing. Yeah. Could you get most of the gist from watching The Signal Adaptation, which I have not seen, Rebecca, but there is one. Yeah, HBO adapted it for a series that debuted in 2018.

1:17:15Jeff O'Neal:It's eight episodes, I believe, the first season that does this book. I watched the first episode earlier this week. It's beautiful. It's in Italian. There's a lot of voiceover. So you've got to like voiceover and be cool as an English speaking viewer with captions to make it work. I don't know how the rest of it holds up. It got good reviews that I saw. So you could, but I think you should read this. I do too. Like I said, the special sauce to me are those passages where she's trying to describe what Lila means to her. And you could get a voiceover that does that. But like, you've got the book right there.

1:17:52But maybe that's me. Movie, musical, TV series, or Muppets?

1:17:55Jeff O'Neal:I think it absolutely should have been a movie. Like eight episodes for this. I understand the desire to do it. But if you could move the girls from girlhood up through that big wedding scene in, you know, two hours, you could really just pack the most meaningful scenes and interactions from the book. I'm concerned about how baggy an eight hour version of this might have felt because there is there's just not that much plot. And there are a lot of characters to keep straight and just a lot of like small interactions that are meaningful for the girls, but not really in the grand scheme. I'm like, I would have done this as a movie if I, you know, given the keys.

1:18:32I should have said this in the reading experience section, but I did have sections of like, not bagginess, but like, here's another little thing that happened and I'm kind of moving on. Like, I don't know. They don't all hit the same, which is going to happen when you have essentially Romana Clef here, which is a series, you know, that's happening. Let's see. Trivia adaptations, rumors, misattributed quotes, and more. I already mentioned that the investigation into Ferrante's identity got some. I'm calling them fraught results. I think there's a couple of these that if they're true, I think would shake some people pretty bad.

1:19:08Not that they're bad people necessarily, but I think the edifice of Ferrante and My Brilliant Friend, the Jenga tire might fall a little bit if one of those two particular blocks were load-bearing for you. Yeah.

1:19:23Jeff O'Neal:The books resulted in just tons of Ferrante-themed tourism in Naples. Really interesting stuff. There were Ferrante pizzas in different restaurants being made at one point in 2014, 2015, 2016, which is super interesting, especially given how gritty the Naples of the books is. This is not a glamorous story. Lila is manifestly dirty for the first two-thirds of the book. She's just rolling around it. Yeah, just dirty. and messy and rebellious. And then I think the most interesting piece of trivia about this is the one I said at the top, that Europa Editions was founded by Ferrante's Italian publishers because no American publisher was going to take her work.

1:20:06Jeff O'Neal:And that's like how many editors who passed on early Ferrante are kicking themselves now that they could have been the publishers of this quartet. Oh man, hot takes. You've got the one that I'm scared of because... Because the world's most reasonable man is not going to like this one. Yeah. Straight to jail for anybody who thinks that a man could have written this. I don't normally, as I was saying, come down like this hard about authorship stuff. But there is something felt about the way that Ferrante captures being a girl and this friendship that I just don't think there's any amount of research that could get you there.

1:20:43Jeff O'Neal:And I'm willing to believe that there are parts of the male experience that only another man could capture or has captured in writing. Like, I would be mad to find out that Ferrante is a pen name for a man, but only because that's a shitty thing to do. Like, Elena Ferrante gives interviews where she talks about being a mother. Well, that's a difference. That's the thing that would make me mad is, like, the lying about the sources of your experience. if it just turned out that a man had written this, like, okay, you did an amazing thing here. I would love to live in a world that is filled with a bunch of men who understand women in this way.

1:21:23Jeff O'Neal:But I just don't buy it. You know, I had a couple notes related to that. I think I'm just going to let them lie. I think I'm best off just letting them. You can read them. They're for you, maybe, and I can move on. I just wonder, I think it's absolutely not the phenomenon that it is without the pen name thing. Now - Totally agree. Is that a 4 % reduction in fever? Is it 40 %? I don't know. I think it does well, but the ceiling is lower because mystique matters. You need something special, and that's part of what makes this special here at the same time. I feel the same way after my first reading.

1:21:59I thought it was pretty great and yet have almost no desire to read the rest. We get it. Your friend is weirdly compelling, and that makes you feel some kind of way. That's my short version of the L.A. Ferrante.

1:22:12Yeah, that's the thing we need the German word for.

1:22:15Jeff O'Neal:Your friend is weirdly compelling and makes you feel some kind of way. Yeah. Further reading. An interesting one. A lot of ways to go out of Ferrante, but no obvious ones for me. No obvious ones. This one was challenging for me. But I will start with The Ferrante Letters by Sarah Chehea, Merv Emery, Catherine Hill and Jill Richards. Shouts to friend of the pod, Laura McGrath, who was on the Interpreter of Maladies episode for turning me on to this. These four women are scholars, great readers, and they're friends, and they wrote each other a bunch of letters back and forth as they were reading and thinking about Ferrante at kind of the height of the fever.

1:22:50Jeff O'Neal:Merv Emery also has an excellent essay in the book that I believe was published elsewhere online. You could Google it called The Cage of Authorship. That just, it made all my dopamine fire about the mystique around Ferrante, about Emery's own experiences conducting one of those interviews by email with Ferrante and like just angsting over how to phrase the question to try to get the kind of answer that she would want. And then like Ferrante would open up a little so she would step in more. But then Ferrante would pull back, and so then she would try to pull back and just what that calibration was like.

1:23:24Jeff O'Neal:I think I'm more interested in people talking about Ferrante than I am in reading more Ferrante. So if that's you, the Ferrante letters. Maybe also Sula by Toni Morrison. Not a direct read-alike, but one of the lines that I always think of when I think of Sula is, we was girls together. and it is about a long friendship. We meet Sula and the other main character of the book, her best friend, later in life. Like they are adults when we meet them, but they have been friends for a long time. And it gets that like tangly enmeshed, I love you, sometimes I hate you. Frenemy is not the right word for it.

1:24:02No, that's the one that everyone reaches for, but it's like -

1:24:06Jeff O'Neal:It's the wrong word. It's a misdirection. You're getting the complication, but not the substance in that particular. What do you think about Sally Rooney as a comp? I saw this all over the Internet.

1:24:21No, not really. I mean, it's not bad, I guess. It's like literary fiction, people having relationships with each other. I guess I've only read the most recent one, which I can't even remember the name of right now. Well, it seems like it's more about romantic relationships, like complicating them that way. I don't know. I think Rooney is a good writer. I think Ferrante is a step further into the purgatory of complication than Rooney tends to go, which I like better myself, but I like Sally Rooney. I've got a couple of thoughts. It's a more recent book, Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu, which is about a couple of friends over several decades and they're artists.

1:25:04And it's different, but I felt the vibe. I would not be surprised to me if Stephanie Wambugu didn't read and have a strong reaction to my brilliant friend. I was also thinking about, and this is getting to, I added a new section of what other well-read picks does this connect to? But I was thinking of, I like a book where we get a narrator looking at a weird, troublesome being person. And in The Professor's House by Willa Cather, the professor, the main character, the point of view character is a professor at a Midwestern college. And one of his students, Tom Outland, is a remarkable person. Like, he journeys out, he's vibrant, just something.

1:25:44He's got the riz, I guess, as the kids would say. Like, there's just something special about him. and his mentorship of him, and then how Tom Outland sort of exceeds, goes on, and then what ultimately happens to Outland. It's not girl dynamics, but this idea of seeing someone that you think there's something there to, and it's reflecting maybe a lack of your own. And does it fill the lack? Does it inform it? Does it help you ameliorate it? Does it heighten it? I find that dynamic very interesting. So always a chance to shout out Professor's House. Not probably in the top four Cather novels that people care about.

1:26:20If you have top four Will a Cather novels feelings, I will read your zero to well-read email with extreme prejudice. I'm here for that for sure.

1:26:28Jeff O'Neal:Please give Jeff the gift of your top four Cather novels. Anything else in the further reading? I don't remember if there's anything else. I just Googled around a little bit because I could not land personally on something that felt like it captured the vibe. But Reddit really likes to compare these to The Years by Annie or No. Also another big book. Which I have not read Any or No, so that's interesting. The Group by Mary McCarthy, and then A Girl is a Body of Water by Jennifer Anansabugu Mukumbi. So lots of Googles you can do if you're looking for something like a Ferrante fix, though I suspect this is a pretty singular reading experience.

1:27:04Yeah. So what does it connect to overtly or implicitly? So there's a lot of little women there. At one point, the girls read little women until their copy is falling apart. And so, like, I don't think Ferrante could put little women in sparklier fire shooting things. Like, think of little women, think of little women here. So if you want to do that, I think that makes a ton of sense. Like, it's 150 years earlier, and they're sisters. But how those daughters, the March daughter slash sisters, relate to each other and are formed and form each other's identities, I think is kind of all over this.

1:27:39Rebecca, what do you think about that? I totally agree.

1:27:41Jeff O'Neal:And I think at a lot of points, the relationship between Elena and Lila feels more like what it feels like to be a sister than just a straight friendship. There's kind of no question that they're going to ride or die, that they are going to be friends with each other forever. They are in each other's lives and in a way that you can't opt out of, really, that sisterhood has with it. And that like that can just be also so fraught and competitive and also supportive and also lovely, but terrifying. And what do I do with you? And I think Little Women is a great read-alike. I was thinking Gatsby at the same time, in the same Professor House where there's, you know, Carraway is looking at Gatsby, but also these fraught romantic relationships and really this focusing of charismatic and enigmatic characters.

1:28:29But I think there's something in the scene setting. It feels like the eternal summer of Italy and where they are in these places, I think, makes sense.

1:28:35Jeff O'Neal:That's a really good one. I had secret history as well for these complicated friendships, relationships. Maybe. How are we bouncing off each other? We're trying to grow up at the same time with ideas. And also, what other book is largely about learning Greek? I didn't have another pick for people learning Greek, Rebecca, so there's that. And then lastly, I have Bluest Eye for the sense of being enmeshed into a community that becomes stifling, right? The main character of Bluest Eye has no Lila. I think it's interesting to think about how different that book is if there is a Lila figure. And I think the narrator of The Bluest Eye also kind of implicitly understands that there was no one there for her at these moments.

1:29:12I like that segment. Let's do that some more. Now that we've got 40 or 50. Added that to my notes. Cocktail party crib sheet, Rebecca. Three to five takeaways. I think I only, is it only me that has something? It's only you this time. Yeah. In all bold caps, never underestimate books for, about young women.

1:29:29Jeff O'Neal:Yep. Just don't do it. Don't do it. If someone comes to you with an Italian phenomenon about young women, do not make them found their own imprint. Yeah. Maybe I'm introducing into the record the idea of the friendship saga. Okay. Like an epic. Yes. Like to do something Ferrante seems to be like, this is not about Odysseus and tall ships or the fall of Troy or whatever, or Count of Monte Cristo. But their relationships over decades is a kind of saga. And I would be interested if there's others. Yeah, if you put them all together, you've got like 1 ,200 pages. You have something the size of my struggle.

1:30:07Jeff O'Neal:You've got war and peace. Yeah. And then this is something to take to other people who have heard about the book. This is not just what it's about. This is the idea of the cocktail. Like, what could you say that's interesting beyond what you could Wikipedia? That's how I think about this. Is that Ferrante's anonymity has made people lose their damn mind. Oh, absolutely. Outside of like what you think of it, I think it's enough to notice that with some interest. It makes people lose their damn mind. It just does. final beat our zero to well-read score each one gets a score from one to ten with ten being the highest uh historical importance readability current relevance of central questions a book nerd read create an ob damn factor interesting topography of this one here we're only 14 years out so we've got the we haven't had that much time which is sort of an automatic demerit or you know It caps the possibility here.

1:30:54Are there children of Ferrante? Are you like looking around like this is it gets does it get comped anymore? I'm just trying to think about this, Rebecca.

1:31:02Jeff O'Neal:I have not seen it. Like, I don't know if it's ever been a popular comp title. Like, that's a bold claim to try to make that. Maybe in 2016 when it was real hot. Maybe. But I don't really see it around. I mean, it was just declared the best book of the century so far. But that was before James was really big and other great books as well. If I were a betting woman, I would bet that should the New York Times revisit that best books of the century so far in 2050, I think this falls down the list. recency does something for a book. And this was the biggest literary phenomenon or one of the biggest literary phenomena of the century so far.

1:31:49Jeff O'Neal:Not the biggest book phenomenon, but literary. That matters. That matters. I was thinking about that Times thing. We submitted unranked ballots for it. You just submitted a list of 10 books and then they had a tool built in that was like this book versus this book. And you would tap which one you preferred. And then it would take the one that you preferred and put it against another book. And you could do that for quite a while. But I don't know what the actual methodology was for where that ranking tool put books into the list. Did more people than anybody else just happen to put My Brilliant Friend in their top 10 on those ballots?

1:32:26Jeff O'Neal:Did it just appear on more ballots? Or did it actually get ranked as better in those head-to-heads? Because it still is surprising to me that this book, now that we've read it and talked about it for an hour and a half. I still find it surprising that it sits there in the number one spot. So historical importance. I'm going to put it. Six? Oh, three. I'm saying number one of the centuries so far, it's a low ceiling high floor is what I was thinking. I don't think it can be an eight, nine, or ten. And it hasn't had a bunch of, at least to my knowledge, and maybe my lonely crowds comp, that That is actually under my point.

1:33:06But my sense is there hasn't been a lot of Ferrante's Ferrante and there's not a lot of, you know, it's not like speculative fiction that became literary fiction. It's like one of these macro trends. So I don't know. I was going to say six or seven, but I'm willing to go with whatever you think.

1:33:19Jeff O'Neal:Let's give it a five. Let's put her in the middle. Okay. Readability. No plot. Hard to keep the character straight. In translation. Interesting sentence structure at points. Four? It's not long. Oh, it's higher than four. It's not hard to get through. Like, you're going to get through it. I guess I'm thinking in terms of the page-turniness for this. Oh, page-turniness. Yeah. Seven? It's all 10 million copies. It has to be at least a seven. Let's give it a seven. Yeah. Current relevance of central questions would be easier to score if I knew what they were. Because I think one of the – if you're hearing me do anything, maybe both of us, reveling a little bit in the friction of getting to the core of what the book is.

1:33:59It is unresolved, at least in this.

1:34:01Jeff O'Neal:It's either zero or ten. Yeah. I think that's right. Like what to make of friendship and life in the world as a woman, girlhood. Like that's there are always people experiencing that. It's a central question for half of the globe. But there's not another big question at the center of this book. It's really kind of just a portrait. I don't know. What do we do with that? Stick it in the middle and call it five? I don't know. Five? Six? Let's do six. Okay. I don't like five. I don't know why. All right. Book nerd read cred. Well, another interesting one. I think it's the one that we're doing this a lot.

1:34:45We have the if you're reading it now, where you've come out of the Sturm and Drang, Hurly Burly, everyone's reading it and talking about how great it is.

1:34:57I don't know. This is maybe another six.

1:35:00Jeff O'Neal:That feels right to me. Yeah. So the oh damn factor, we were explaining this to the guests. I was trying to. It's like when it's really cooking and it doesn't have to be for long, like when it's doing its real thing, what is your reading soul wow factor? And I'm going nine. Yeah, nine is where I was going to go. There are some passages that are stunning. I found myself very stimulated, provoked, leaning in, furrowing my brow, thinking about it when I'm not reading the book, dwelling for moments under phrases and passages. That's kind of what I'm looking for in this particular category. Yeah. A weird zero to well-read score dynamic.

1:35:42Very weird. I feel less certain about this, which is already a very fraud game to play with these books.

1:35:50Jeff O'Neal:I would bet we get more emails about My Brilliant Friend than about many of the past titles. People have read it. I mean, it's number eight on the list. Like, people remember. I think it's interesting that New York Times Reader's List has much more recency bias because, like, wasn't Demon Copperhead, was it number one? It was number one, yeah. Number one. And that was like two years old. So I wonder as it ages in oak, how much complexity those lists will get. Well, this was something, Rebecca. Thank you so much. Go to patreon.com slash zero to well read for our guided readalongs. The first of which will be sailing the wine dark sea with Odysseus.

1:36:24And let's be honest, it doesn't go great for a lot of people that aren't Odysseus that get onto that boat. Heading back to Ithaca from Ilium and other membership options there, which do include early ad free access. You can follow us on the socials at Zero to Well Read Podcast. Choose email, especially for a mailbag, but for any old reason, especially if you have top four rankings of Willa Catter's book, Zero to Well Read at BookRat.com. Thanks to Thrift Books for sponsoring this season of Zero to Well Read. Zero to Well Read is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. Rebecca, you did it.

1:36:55You read My Brilliant Friend.

1:36:59Jeff O'Neal:Happy to be here. Congratulations to you. Thank you.

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