Girl/friends: parallels between Conversations with Friends & My Brilliant Friend
Discussion, literary fiction
Spoilers for the My Brilliant Friend series and Conversations with Friends below.
If you’ve read Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend series, you’ll know that one of the key features of Lila and Lenù’s complicated relationship is how their minds work together, Lenù’s admiration for Lila’s clarity of mind and brilliant ideas, and Lila’s happiness in sharing those moments with Lenù. This is something that is outlined again and again in the four books dedicated to their friendships, and it immediately came to my mind when I read this passage from Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends:
Listening to Bobbi theorise in this way was exciting. She spoke in clear, brilliant sentences, like she was making shapes in the air out of glass or water. She never hesitated or repeated herself. Every so often she would catch my eye and I would nod: yes, exactly. This agreement seemed to encourage her, like she was searching my eyes for approval, and she would look away again and continue: by which I mean… (CWF, ch 25)
Early on in the novel—note: if you dislike the first few chapters of Conversations, keep going: they aren’t nearly as good as the rest of the book—Frances, the narrator, mentions how she is the writer but she needs Bobbi for their spoken word poetry nights. I think this parallels Lila and Lenù’s relationship in a way, because Lila is Lenù’s muse: the reason the story gets written at all is that Lila disappears, and Lenù wants to keep a record of their long friendship. Bobbi, like Lila, is more active, more spirited, and possibly more brilliant; Frances, like Lenù, is more reserved and quiet, as well as more insecure. Both relationships are layered and have their moments of tension, break-ups, reconciliations.
The two girls’ intellectual capacities being augmented by being near the other, through non-verbal cues and looks, sharing ideas and the excitement of ideas, is a theme in the My Brilliant Friend series as well; this passage from the “Adolescence” chapters of the story parallels the above:
What wonderful conversations. I looked at her white, smooth skin, not a blemish. I looked at her lips, the delicate shape of her ears. 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: more effectively than she had as a child, she took the facts and in a natural way charged them with tension; she intensified reality as she reduced it to words, she injected it with energy. But I also realized, with pleasure, that, as soon as she began to do this, I felt able to do the same, and I tried 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’s speaking to me. What beautiful strong hands she had, what graceful gestures came to her, what looks. (MBF, ch III.11) [original1]
—attention: further spoilers now—
I think there’s something else here that parallels Lila and Lenù’s relationship with Frances and Bobbi’s: an undercurrent of attraction, both sexual and intellectual. In Conversations, Bobbi and Frances were girlfriends for a time and Frances admits, in writing, to consider Bobbi the love of her life2. The closest Lenù comes to admitting to herself any attraction to Lila is in book three, when she reflects, “With difficulty I reached the point of asking myself: had she and I ever touched each other? Had I ever wished to, as a child, as a girl, as an adult? And her? I hovered on the edge of those questions for a long time. I answered slowly: I don’t know, I don’t want to know. And then I admitted that there had been a kind of admiration for her body, maybe that, yes, but I ruled out anything ever happening between us. Too much fear, if we had been seen we would have been beaten to death.” (TWLTWS, I.85) [original3]. Interestingly, the same chapter ends with a passionless sex scene between Lenù and her husband—and while the translation says “we had sex”, which I feel implies some mutuality, the original text is more literally translatable with “he took me”, implying a greater degree of passivity from Lenù. In the very first book, Lenù bathes Lila before Lila’s wedding, and she is overwhelmed by a “violent emotion”, looking at Lila’s naked body for the first time, observing her with concealed but clear desire, an “agitated heart” and “inflamed veins” (MBF, III.57).
If Lila and Lenù had been born fifty years later, like the protagonists of Rooney’s novel, would their relationship have looked more like Bobbi and Frances’? I’m not sure it wouldn’t have. Like Lila, Bobbi assumes that their relationship is stronger than any other Frances might have, that it has priority on other relationships (“do you really rank our relationship below your passing sexual interest in some middle aged married guy? it hurt my fucking feelings actually.”) (CWF, ch. 10), and her own crush for Melissa is soon revealed to mean a lot less than her love for Frances. The novel goes on to explore the complex relationships all four main characters have with each other, and while Frances loves Nick—Lenù also loved Nino—it doesn’t take away from the love she has for Bobbi.
While Frances and Lenù are very different individuals, and the same goes for Bobbi and Lila, I find it very interesting that put together as pair dynamics, they share so many similarities. Of course, they’re not exactly the same, but I do believe they’re sufficiently close for a comparison to be made. Moreover, while a queer reading of My Brilliant Friend isn’t very popular, I believe Ferrante to be a very intentional author, who wouldn’t have inserted certain elements if they didn’t mean something. Of course, the relationship between Lila and Lenù is first and foremost a friendship, as it’s only ever realised as such, and they are to various degrees both attracted to men in their lifetime, but this doesn’t lessen the fact that at the very least, Lenù felt physical attraction towards Lila. Frances and Bobbi are, because of their different situation, able to express and convey that attraction; and they also are, first and foremost, friends.
Funnily enough, Elena Ferrante’s top 40 list of books by female authors, published in 2020, includes one Sally Rooney novel, but it’s Normal People. And Sally Rooney has mentioned Elena Ferrante in an interview about Conversations, but only in reference to novels by female authors being assumed to be biographical. Well, at least we know they’re aware of each other.
“Che bei discorsi. Le guardai la pelle bianchissima, liscia, non una screpolatura. Le guardai le labbra, la forma delicata delle orecchie. Sì, pensai, forse sta cambiando, e non solo fisicamente, anche nel modo di esprimersi. Mi sembrò – formulato con parole d’oggi – che non solo sapesse dire bene le cose ma che stesse sviluppando un dono che già conoscevo: meglio di come faceva da bambina, prendeva i fatti e li rendeva con naturalezza carichi di tensione; rinforzava la realtà mentre la riduceva a parole, le iniettava energia. Ma mi accorsi anche, con piacere, che appena cominciava a farlo, ecco che mi sentivo anch’io la capacità di fare lo stesso e ci provavo e mi veniva bene. Questo – pensai contenta – mi distingue da Carmela e da tutte le altre: io m’infiammo insieme a lei, qui, nel momento stesso in cui mi parla. Che belle mani forti aveva, che bei gesti le venivano, che sguardi.”
Spoiler: It’s interesting to note that both Frances and Lenù publish writings which center the other girl as the main source of love and inspiration in their life, and both Bobbi and Lila break up with the other after the publishing directly because of the content of the story.
“Arrivai con fatica a pormi la domanda: io e lei ci siamo mai toccate? Avevo mai desiderato di farlo, da bambina, da ragazzina, da adolescente, da adulta? E lei? Restai sull’orlo di quelle domande a lungo. Mi risposi piano: non lo so, non lo voglio sapere. E poi ammisi che una specie di ammirazione mia per il suo corpo, forse quella sì, c’era stata, ma esclusi che fosse mai accaduto qualcosa tra noi. Troppa paura, se ci avessero viste ci avrebbero uccise a mazzate.”