A transformative friendship
on My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
for Isabella
We shouldn’t be compatible. Because I was born on one day and you another; and they say my stars should exhaust yours and your planets shall always disagree with mine. There is merit in what they say, I’m sure, though when I look for guidance I reach never for the stars – only for your hand. Our friendship defies divination.
My friend Bella and I met in third grade. There’s only so much I can remember from the early days of our friendship, but I recall strong feelings of admiration. She was good with numbers. She often finished first in our daily exercise of multiplications and divisions, her eyes bright and electric as a sprinter after winning a marathon, and as I looked to her, bitter with jealousy, I felt that she was sure of nothing else other than her brilliance, and the sprinter that she was would run another mile just because she can. She read a lot of books, too. She rarely told me about them, but we spent much of our time in the library, sifting through Goosebumps and graphic novels. I deduced from this fact that she is of extraordinary intellect, and each passing year, when the homeroom teacher read our grades, I was proven right. I cheered at every one of her achievements, no matter how violent envy kicked in my stomach. I felt ashamed when I read Elena Ferrante’s words: “I was happy, yes, that she was so good even without school, without books from the library, but that happiness made me guiltily unhappy.” Yet we went on to learn first aid, fight delinquent boys, and entered the wilderness that is the English language—together, her hand in mine. They seemed to outstrip any unspoken rivalry.
We parted ways at 12 years old. I moved to another school, giddy and nervous about being apart from longtime friends. Bella and I kept in touch. I had gotten a puppy for Christmas that year, and she was the first person I had invited home to meet him. I would never forget how the fluffy golden retriever leapt into her arms. Perhaps he had recognised her brightness, too. Bella would sleep over sometimes, and she would tell me about the boys that she was enamoured with. I laid there perplexed, puzzled by these experiences I had not yet been privy to. I would laugh at stories of awkward encounters and cooed at romantic ones, and I would offer as much advice as my limited knowledge allowed. But I knew, there, stirring again in my stomach, is a rush of jealousy—this time of the admiration she so easily received from the opposite sex.
This should not have surprised me, I realise. Bella had always been spirited and outgoing; curious and carefree. She is gravitational pull personified, the cool girl in a romantic comedy. I had thought, for almost our whole lives, that making friends to her is easy as pie. In fact, I—reserved and high-strung—had spent years hiding behind her personality, trailing along as she made new acquaintances and came across new discoveries. Bella was my shield, and I felt her alarming absence when she was no longer at the seat next to me, furiously tinkering with numbers. I worried, of course. I was anxious to be apart from my friend. But I had wanted to, more than anything, to brave a new world and leave behind my inadequacies; to wield a quiver of arrows and hide away my shield. Elena Ferrante’s protagonist, Lenù, who travelled away from her friend Lila to study, articulated my thoughts:
"When school started again, on the one hand I suffered because I knew I wouldn’t have time for Lila anymore, on the other I hoped to detach myself from that sum of the misdeeds and compliances and cowardly acts of the people we knew, whom we loved, whom we carried—she, Pasquale, Rino, I, all of us—in our blood."
Bella, too, had wanted to eject herself from the only world we knew—though I would not hear of it until years later.
She moved to my school when we were 15 years old. She quickly joined a friend group, and I warned her about old friends and outsiders, about a presence that is read as an intrusion. She wept when she felt their rejection, and I realised then that something had changed: there, shaking from the unfamiliar force of exclusion, she seemed to me almost human, fragile as I was. She was brilliant as she always had been, her will remained unshakeable and her spunky character never ceased to radiate. Yet she was no longer an image of perfection I had thought her to be. She can’t wait to get out of here, she said, she can’t wait to start over and travel abroad; to lead an adventure. I looked to her as she swiped at her eyes, and I saw myself, for the very first time, balancing with her on an equal plane. I found us then in Ferrante’s passage: “Trained by our schoolbooks to speak with great skill about what we had never seen, we were excited by the invisible.”
It was easy after that. We both went on adventures of our own, at our own time, passing stories when we find ourselves at home again. My insecurities, now replaced by dousing self-regard, have kept envy at bay. Her path is different from my own, and I had lost—or, perhaps, forgotten—reason to begrudge her, and I wait for her new discoveries as she waits for mine; a love cemented by endless curiosity. Ferrante described this newfound feeling: “Yes, I thought, maybe she’s changing, and not only physically but in the way she expresses herself. It seemed to me—articulated in words of today—that not only did she know how to put things well but she was developing a gift that I was already familiar with…But I also realised, with pleasure, that, as soon as she began to do this, I felt able to do the same, and I tried it and it came easily. This—I thought contentedly—distinguishes me from Carmela and all the others: I get excited with her, here, at the very moment when she is speaking to me.”
Our friendship had been nothing short of transformative, and through it I found a lesson more valuable than any number: power shared will—joyfully and without much trouble—put to shame power in isolation. She was, and is, as Keeley Schaefer wrote in her book Text Me When You Get Home, “a life raft I didn’t know I was looking for before I got on it.”
I had also found, while I was writing this, a discovery that might make this essay impossible for her to dislike. Kim TallBear, a professor of racial politics, suggests that transformative female friendships disrupts settler logic. In her book Feminist City, Leslie Kern described that TallBear believed hetero and homonormativity are ways of relating that “values enforced monogamy, private property, and a particular set of relations with the state, which were imposed on indigenous people and are part of the ongoing process of indigenous dispossessions.” TallBear calls this “Settler sexuality,” which diminishes the value of many other ways of being “in relation”, including friendships, non-monogamy, and relationships with the land. It bewilders me that a friendship like ours might—in limited capacity—destabilise oppressive power structures, but the years ahead of us are long, and our possibilities are infinite.
I shall end this with another of Ferrante’s passage, one that will always make me think of you, in light or darkness, above and below, for better or worse.
"We held each other by the hand, we walked side by side, but for me, as usual, it was as if Lila were ten steps ahead and knew precisely what to do, where to go. I was used to feeling second in everything, and so I was sure that to her, who had always been first, everything was clear: the pace, the calculation of the time available for going and coming back, the route that would take us to the sea. I felt as if she had everything in her head ordered in such a way that the world around us would never be able to create disorder. I abandoned myself happily."
