My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

Summary

Zero to Well-Read: “My Brilliant Friend” by Elena Ferrante (June 16, 2026)

Podcast: Zero to Well-Read
Hosts: Geoff O’Neill & Rebecca Schinsky
Book: My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
Episode Theme: An in-depth book club and critical exploration of Ferrante’s iconic first volume of the Neapolitan Quartet, including its cultural phenomenon, signature ambiguity, the wrenching friendship at its heart, and why it inspired “Ferrante Fever.”

Episode Overview

The hosts, Geoff and Rebecca, dive into Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, examining the reasons behind its outsized literary and cultural impact, what makes the novel so singularly powerful, and how it brilliantly renders the charged territory of girlhood, friendship, and social mobility in postwar Naples. From Ferrante’s mystique to the novel’s prickly central relationship, the episode explores both the reading experience and the seismic aftereffects of the book’s publication.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Novel & Its Plot (03:00-04:22)

• My Brilliant Friend is the first in the Neapolitan Quartet, thought of by Ferrante as one large novel.
• Begins with a present-day disappearance: Elena’s best friend Lila vanishes at age 66, prompting Elena (known as Lenu) to recount their childhood and adolescence in a violent Naples neighborhood.
• The novel’s core is the complex friendship: “defined at turns by competition, jealousy, admiration, and a rage kind of intimacy, as Ferrante captures girlhood in its terrifying glory.” (Rebecca, 03:20)
• Major themes: the intoxicating and difficult dynamics of female friendship, the power and peril of education and books, social class, and the push-pull between self and community.

“Ferrante Fever” & the Book’s Global Impact (04:22–09:16)

• The novel, initially published in Italy in 2011 and in English in 2012, became a global phenomenon: “10 million copies worldwide, and then 15 to 20 of the whole quartet.” (Geoff, 05:45)
• Catalyzed by a New York Times review by James Wood, but its reach went far beyond traditional literary circles—book clubs, celebrities, and even mainstream summer readers.
• “This achieved that rare kind of four quadrant success that every book wants to go for. And that doesn't happen on the strength of a mainstream book review alone.” (Rebecca, 07:20)
• Discussion of the paperback original release, making the book accessible and “perfect book club fodder.”

Ferrante’s Pseudonym & Mystique (19:30–27:33)

• Ferrante is a pen name—her true identity is unknown, and she does no in-person interviews, communicating only via email through her publisher.
• “She says she wants to be able to concentrate exclusively ... on writing and its strategies and just to not have her relationship to the work mediated by the constant chatter.” (Rebecca, 21:06)
• Various journalistic investigations have speculated about the author’s identity, but both hosts agree: “Actually, I don’t care.” (Geoff, 24:06; Rebecca, 24:06)
• Ferrante’s anonymity arguably intensified the book’s mystique and impact.

The Unusual Reading Experience (29:29–43:03)

• Neither host felt wholehearted, fanatical love, though both respect the book immensely.
• Rebecca: “I really appreciated it but it didn’t ring all of my personal bells. And I think that’s just idiosyncratic reading tastes. I don’t find childhood to be that interesting.” (29:36)
• Geoff: “I really liked it … but my gut doesn’t [get the hype].” (30:59)
• Both found the central friendship nuanced, uncomfortable, and worthy of deep analysis, even if neither found the book utterly transformative.

The Friendship at the Core: Lila & Elena (32:47–41:11)

• Articulation of “a friendship that resists the word ‘friend.’”
• “One thing the book is trying to articulate is: what is Lila? What is she to Elena? Because friend doesn’t do it right.” (Geoff, 31:49)
• Rebecca: “It’s ride or die in a lot of ways, but it’s also so conflicted … they compete … they sharpen each other … they admire each other, they resent each other.” (33:40)
• The dynamic is described as codependent, passionate, and—while rare—deeply true.

Naples, Class, Violence, & Competition (35:54–44:57)

• The neighborhood and era (postwar Naples) are “hostile to their selfhood,” and patriarchal violence is normalized.
• Both girls rely on education and each other to escape—or navigate—the constraints of their environment.
• “Clinging to each other, like both trying not to drown at the same time ... that kind of codependency, that existential … question of survival.” (Geoff, 35:54)
• Lila and Elena diverge: “Elena uses education to carve her own way out … Leila is crafting the best life she can within that world.” (Rebecca, 38:14)
• The wedding at the novel’s end is seen as both climactic and a kind of “capitulation” to social expectations.

The Limits of Plot & the Pleasures of Language (41:11–43:50)

• The novel’s “plot” is intentionally meandering: daily life, interpersonal drama, no grand narrative arc.
• “I found myself just sort of caught up in the flow of it because it is just daily life.” (Rebecca, 41:11)
• The boyfriends and secondary male characters are largely interchangeable, arguably by design. The focus is relentlessly on the two girls/women.

The Central Questions & Namedropping Literary Theory (47:46–51:45)

• The book explores how adolescent friendship shapes identity, and resonates with psychoanalytic theory—the Lacanian “mirror stage”—as both girls see versions of themselves in the other.
• Gender, class, and the formation of selfhood are central.
• Title reversal: Both friends ultimately see the other as “my brilliant friend.”
  • “For Leila 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.” (Rebecca, 51:17)
• The “shoe” metaphor and its complexity are mentioned, but the hosts avoid spoiling its significance.

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On the friendship’s ambiguity:
  “Friend doesn’t do it right. And I think we all have people in our lives that friend just doesn’t quite capture … the varieties of the way we can be in relationship to each other is still not completely mapped.” — Geoff (31:49)
• On the book’s success:
  “This achieved that rare kind of four quadrant success that every book wants to go for. And that doesn’t happen on the strength of a mainstream book review alone.” — Rebecca (07:20)
• On Ferrante’s anonymity:
  “She’s constructed a room of one’s own, but it’s also, you know, a whole existence where her art enters into the world without the surrounding cloud of any real identity.” — Rebecca (21:21)
• On Lila and Elena’s dynamic:
  “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.” — Rebecca (33:47)
• Gatsby nod:
  “To borrow from Gatsby, Leila and Lenu are simultaneously enchanted and repelled by each other.” — Rebecca (33:40)
• On both being “the brilliant friend”:
  “We’ve gotten 300 pages of Elena writing about Leila. But for Leila to look at Elena and be like, you’re my brilliant friend ... I really enjoyed that.” — Rebecca (51:17)
• Literary seams showing:
  “Only an Italian would write a book where handmade shoes are so important.” — Geoff (52:18)
• On the experience of reading as an outsider:
  “I am 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.” — Rebecca (28:00)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• Intro & Plot Overview: 02:49–04:22
• Ferrante Fever: Book’s Success 04:22–09:16
• Ferrante’s Anonymity: 19:30–27:33
• Personal Reading Experiences: 28:00–31:22
• Friendship at the Core (Lila & Elena): 31:46–41:11
• Class, Violence, and Escape in Naples: 41:11–44:57
• Literary Gimmicks, Title, and Theory: 47:46–51:45
• Non-content/Ad breaks: 09:16, 30:58, 35:23, 42:11, 53:29, 58:39, 91:53

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Further Reading & Readalikes

• The Ferrante Letters by Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, and Jill Richards: Four friends/scholars correspond about Ferrante and the experience of reading her.
• Sula by Toni Morrison: A tangled, lifelong friendship between women—“We was girls together.”
• The Years by Annie Ernaux
• The Group by Mary McCarthy
• A Girl is a Body of Water by Jennifer Nanseibuga Makumbi
• The Professor’s House by Willa Cather: For those interested in a narrator reflecting on a uniquely compelling “other.”

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Cocktail Party Takeaways

• My Brilliant Friend is about girlhood, but it’s also a seismic exploration of class, ambition, and what it means to be inextricably bound to another person.
• Ferrante’s anonymity turbo-charged the book’s mythos and may have raised its literary ceiling.
• This is not your typical “nostalgic” friendship novel; its depiction of violence, desperation, and social constraint is unsparing.
• The “friendship saga”—tracking close, sometimes dangerous relationships across decades—may be a new literary subgenre.
• Literary influence: Think of Little Women with a Southern Italian edge; relationships are as formative as family ties.

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Zero to Well-Read Score (Approximate)

• Historical Importance: 5/10 (“High floor, low ceiling”)
• Readability: 7/10 (Not a hard read, but not page-turning for everyone)
• Current Relevance of Central Questions: 6/10
• Book Nerd Cred: 6/10
• O, Damn Factor: 9/10

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Final Thoughts

My Brilliant Friend remains a touchstone for its granular portrayal of female friendship and the ache of self-invention under constraint. Whether or not you’re swept up in Ferrante Fever, its artistry and implacable honesty linger—an experience made more complex and fascinating by the shroud of its author’s identity.

For in-depth literary conversation and further reading guides, check out the hosts’ office hours, and join the next Zero to Well-Read pick!

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Transcript

[Geoff O'Neill]

This episode of Zero to well Read is sponsored by Thriftbooks.com and if you're looking for an edition of My Brilliant Friend to read to, gift to encounter for the first time to replace, go to thriftbooks.com to find one. I'll be honest, I've never really loved the English edition that we get here in America of My brilliant friend, wedding couple facing away, flower girls behind them. It's beautiful and it's evocative of a scene towards the end of the book, of course, but I found on thriftbooks.com a cover I had never seen before of an English version by the Text Publishing Company. It's a mass market paperback, but this cover has two sort of school girls running along this cobblestone street excitedly, scaredly, joyously holding hands. And that to me really captures the core of the experience of reading My Brilliant Friend. That's the kind of thing you can find browsing around thriftbooks.com and finding a special edition that maybe you don't know about. All kinds of things available there. Thanks to Thriftbooks.com for sponsoring this episode onto the show. Welcome to Zero to well Read, a podcast about everything you need to know about the books you wish you'd read. I am Geoff o'. Neill.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And I'm Rebecca Schinsky. Today we're talking about a novel that inspired such a fan frenzy we had to call it a Fever. It's My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. Before we jump in, though, be sure to remember that you can click the link in the show notes to become a member. For access to our guided Read alongs, early ad free episodes and our bonus content, that's at patreon.com 0to well read the exclusive mini episode Reading guide and private chat for the hot Greek Summer inaugural Read along of the Odyssey are available now for members.

[Geoff O'Neill]

As you're listening, I promise at the end of that you will know what a trireme is. You just will, you know. If you don't know now, you should. But you will know at the end of that. If you have a moment. It's summertime. I hope you have a little more time to yourself and you can just use what, 10 seconds of that, Rebecca, to rate the show wherever you're listening, Apple podcasts, Spotify, wherever. And if you've got 40 seconds, you can even leave a review. Get your thoughts and questions as well to our mailbag episode which is coming up next month. Shoot us an email zero to well read bookriot.com it can be specific about the books we've read. It could be general. There is really no time when it comes to the zero to well read mailbag. So get your thoughts in there real quick. My Brilliant Friend, Rebecca. This was hitting at an interesting time for us because we were just sort of starting to do professional, I don't know, mainstream book things at this particular time. And we watched in shock and awe as this swept from reader to reader, from tote bag to tote bag around the us around the world, even.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yes, really around the world.

[Geoff O'Neill]

My Brilliant Friend. So for people who don't know anything about My Brilliant Friend, what is this book about? And then we'll get into why it's important and the furor around it.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Sure. So this is the first book in Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet. She thinks of them as one big book, and that's helpful to know. All of them are translated into English by Ann Goldstein. This one, My Brilliant Friend, begins with a phone call. Elena Greco. She's the best. The main character, her best friend of nearly 60 years, Leela Charullo, has disappeared without a trace. Leela's brother is distraught, but Elena, or Lenu to her friends, isn't worried. She knows that this is exactly what her friend always planned to do. But in Leila's absence, Elena, who's a successful writer, recounts the early years of their friendship in this vibrant but often violent neighborhood that they grew up in on the outskirts of Naples. And that takes us from their meeting as 10 year olds in school up through turbulent days of adolescence and young love. It's complex. It's an often conflicted friendship that's really defined at turns by competition, jealousy, admiration and a rage kind of intimacy, as Ferrante captures girlhood in its terrifying glory. Terrifying glory against the backdrop of post war Italy from 1950 up to the early 2000s, in the later books of the quartet. And spoiler alert, folks, it's also about the magic of books, the liberating power of literacy, and the ways that reading and writing can bring us together and tear us apart.

[Geoff O'Neill]

So that's the story we'll get into what it's like to read this, what the ideas are. I think we'll jump to quickly. Hold that into your mind, everyone. That's just what Rebecca said right there. That's what it's about. It doesn't sound to me like the kind of thing that's just ready to blow up and like, consume indie bookstores and book clubs and frankly, literary fiction at all for the next Several years. The books come out in pretty quick succession, right? That's one. I think that's one of the virtues of this particular phenomenon, and we haven't gotten there yet. Elena Ferrante is, of course, a pen name for person or persons unknown. So that's part of the furor here as well. Published in Italy in 2011, and the English translation is 2012. And really quickly it became a thing I have down in my stray thoughts. I'll bring it up here. There was a meaningful New York Times Book Review review by James Wood, sort of doing the thing that those reviews do. And I was like, was this the last make book by a New York Times Book Review review? Like, I feel like this was the. This was the car, the knock, kerosene lamp, and the house fire that started this whole thing. I just don't know any more if this happens. Like, this was in the waning glory of Michiko Kakutani and James Wood's influence over the literary landscape. It's so interesting to see. And then from celebrities to our celebrities like Zadie Smith, all love this book. They blurbed it. And when we get to the read alike section, there's a book we'll talk about that's sort of a crystalline form of fandom, the way that writers express it. And it sold crazily. We're talking millions, you know, 10 million copies worldwide, and then 15 to 20 of the whole quartet. I also. That thing that's interesting how front loaded this is. I think there's a lot of people like me, and I will say this right now, I've only read the first one. We can talk about why that might be later, your own interest in reading the other ones later. But. And then here we stand, 25 years, or, sorry, 1312 to 13 years later after it comes out. It's the number one book of the century on the New York Times list, not the reader's choice list. It's number eight there. But this is the slobs like you and me that the New York Times asked to participate, and it came out number one. And I think it's safe to say, Rebecca, that you and I. I don't think to say I wasn't shocked, but I was surprised that it was number one at that moment. Were you?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I was shocked by the number one. And I think some of that has to do with the fact that I'll talk more about later, but this was my first time reading this book. So at the time that that list came out, I hadn't read it. It Wasn't something that was top of mind for me. We voted in 2024. It's like I just was not thinking about that. A book that was 12 years old, even one that inspired this much fervor, or Ferrante Fever as we called it. There are tons of headlines. There's even a documentary called Ferrante Fever that's about the whole phenomenon. So I was really, really surprised because the fever, but it has quieted down significantly. Like some of that is the changes in the media landscape, the rise of booktok that booktok seems to be into different kinds of books. But I have some questions I could not let go of about how booktok might have received this had they been more contemporaneous. It was really quite surprising to me not to see it on the list, but to see it in number one. And as a reader coming to it for the first time, it's hard to get outside of what that might mean or have it frame the reading experience in some way. I really am curious about this idea that you brought up though, about was this the last big make book from a New York Times Book Review? Because to be this big, it can't only have been made by James Wood. And the kind of people that read New York Times book reviews like it does make its way to Gwyneth Paltrow, who is blurbed on the COVID above James Wood. And it makes its way into mainstream reading culture that like the deep nerds like us were reading this kind of book, but like this was all next to pools and all over beaches and on airplanes. And it was like pick it up and throw it in your bag for the summer book clubs. Read it. This achieved that rare kind of four quadrant success that every book wants to go for. And that doesn't happen on the strength of a mainstream book review alone. Certainly not today, but not even, you know, 14 years ago.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Yeah, and that's why I say it's the kerosene lamp, not the whole sort of situation. Like that thing happens. Like word of mouth is the thing that makes a book like this even booktoker bookstagram. Like I've said in other shows, I don't think I've said on this shows, I think of those platforms as word of mouth on steroids. Right. You still need some of the same structural things to happen. I just think that in this regime that the single biggest sort of fuel source for a, for a phenomenon like this and for a book like this, I should say, is the New York Times Book Review.

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[Rebecca Schinsky]

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[Geoff O'Neill]

I didn't put in the notes and it just occurred to me, and I don't exactly remember what it is you said, but something you said got me thinking about. I wonder if we shouldn't discount at the same time that in the in the years immediately prior, I think just the first couple years immediately prior, we had another phenomenon that was Literary Writing International in Translation in the form of My Struggle by Carl Nausgaard, which again is not one of our books, right? Our shared favorites, I should say no Shade, but I wonder how much that set the stage for this. Was there a literary feminine response or readiness to embrace a female writer doing similar things? Because I don't know, it was in the water. We had these two translated literary juggernauts back to back, which is so unusual and I can't help but think there's got to be some, though I'm probably not smart enough right now to use them together. But there's something there, if you like,

[Rebecca Schinsky]

that came up in some of the articles from 2012, 2013, 2014 that I came across. And like, I think it was in one of the pieces about how there were new release, like midnight new release parties for the subsequent ones. So, like a midnight new release party at an independent bookstore for an adult novel. That's not genre of any kind. Like, never. This never happens.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Never happens. It really never happens.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's a huge deal. And women were. It was mostly women drawn. The readership of this. And they were clamoring for the next ones. And a couple of them did name check. Like, the dudes have gotten their 900 page now scarred books. Let us have a moment for a big series that is just deeply and explicitly concerned with the female experience and with girlhood. I'm also wondering how much it mattered that these came out in paperback. They are paperback originals. So there was no gap in, you know, for folks who are outside the industry, usually there's the hardcover and then there's about a year before the paperback comes out. And often literary novels don't make their way into the book club scene until that paperback moment. But that it was just. They're cheaper, they're easy to toss in whatever bag you're carrying for places. A lot of book clubs will only read books that are in paperback. And this is just like perfect book club fodder.

[Geoff O'Neill]

And the COVID too. It wasn't like an Emily Henry, like, really cartoony, bright color, but it did feel accessible. It looks kind of artsy, but it looks, you know, it's beachy kind of summary. It's not intimidating any way. I think that's a really interesting point. I also don't know. Did you. I don't know if you came across it in your reading. I did not in mine. About the book, whether the publisher had any idea what they had, like, how shocked was the publisher with this? Was it out of print initially? Like, I don't. I didn't see anything from that point of view. I would guess there's probably one somewhere, but I didn't see it because this just is. I. If they did see it, they're the smartest publisher of all time because this doesn't happen. How could you have seen it at the same time?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

This was gonna. I was going to include this down in trivia, but I think it's interesting to mention at this point that Europa Editions, which is Ferrante's publisher in the US was created in, like 2005 because her Italian publishers couldn't find an American publisher for her work. So, like, here's my pretty woman voice. Like, big mistake.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Huge bad job.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

You know, all American mainstream publishing that they. Nobody wanted to pick up the English translations of this. So Ferrante's Italian publishers created Europa Editions to give her earlier novels distribution in the US So they knew, I think, how her previous books had landed. They had found passionate but smaller readerships. And she's huge in Italy and in many parts of Europe. So I think they knew that they had the seeds of something. But you certainly, you don't publish anything expecting that it's going to become a worldwide phenomenon. This is just exceedingly rare and impossible to manufacture.

[Geoff O'Neill]

That also makes sense, too. That's a really good nugget. I didn't know that or remember, or maybe both at the same time. For those of you who don't know about publishing around the world, and why would you necessarily. It's much more common in Europe to have paperback original releases for major titles like this. Hardcover phenomenon here is more of an American situation than it is in other places. So maybe they were just doing it out of habit. Maybe they knew something else there, but they certainly knew enough to bet on spinning up your predictions, doing something else. Your petitions have had some other hits. Like Elegance of the Hitchcock Hog was, I think, probably before this, but that sold like Wildfire as well at the same time named Ferrante, named to the TIME100 2016 with a blurb from Lauren Groff, one of our personal favorites. So, like, there's a certain amount for you and I, Rebecca, of attention must be paid. You have a gene in you that I don't have, which is if we reach a certain level. And this certainly reached it, jumped over it, spat on it, mocked it, whatever the Rebecca Height meridian is that you sort of start to turn your nose on it like a real cool 90s kid that you are at your heart.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's not that. It's that I want to have, like, a pure reading experience. You know, I really try to go into books as cold as possible. And when something like when we have. When it's so big that we are declaring a fever over it, I'm like, I cannot. There's no way that I can encounter this book just like, on its own when it's in the zone of book that I think I will enjoy. Like, I intended to get to this someday. I just needed some space from the fever. I'm glad that we had an opportunity to do it now, but it's really distinct for me from Just what I think of as, like, pop reading phenomena, where the bigger the phenomenon gets, then the more anthropological interest I get in it. So, like, something like fourth wing hits a certain point where I'm like, okay, I've got to read this to find out what. What's going on there. But that's when I know, like, it's not really in my zone. It's not something that I'm normally going to be into, but I'm curious about if it's big hype around something that should be like, straight down the center. For me, I do get a little, like, I just want to somehow come into it without all the influence of everything else. And it was still hard this time to get outside of that.

[Geoff O'Neill]

This is probably the most unusual outside of Shakespeare. The who wrote this section we have because we don't know. This writer who identifies in written interviews, does not give in person interviews, maybe for sort of obvious reasons about knowing what who it actually is refers himself as a she. I am going to put a whole bracket around this. I have no reason to doubt this, but I just want to be careful out there. You know, hold in your mind that this is a performance, at least to some degree. But I think probably the base case here is to take Ferrante at. At her word, writing as frontier entire career with the first book came out in 1992, so had been well into multiple decades of publishing. So this wasn't a. I don't know, like, I'm going to decide here at the end, or I have one giant, huge book, like, we get some of these from time to time where there'll be a huge debut novel that's anonymous. This is something that's interesting to do from the beginning because we have no reason to expect that you're going to have to deal with the slings and arrows of literary fame in Italy. I don't know. She said over and over again that this is about protecting identity. To not really be perceived essentially, to not be subject to everything that comes along with being a public figure, even whatever that meant to her in 1992, is interesting to imagine, but just did not have to deal with it. And I think having read my brilliant friend and thought about this, whatever the identity of that person is, I feel like I would put the most of my truth chips on that to be true, that it's just about not wanting to deal. Right. I feel like that makes a lot of sense to me.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And to have this. She says she wants to be able to concentrate exclusively and with complete freedom on writing and its strategies and just to not have her relationship to the work mediated by the constant chatter, which, like, if it felt that way in 1992, before the Internet was Interneting, I can't imagine how glad this person is now that you made this decision. Also said in this Vanity Fair interview that I simply decided once and for all to liberate myself from the anxiety of notoriety and the urge to be a part of that circle of successful people, those who believe they have won who knows what. This was an important step for me today. I feel, thanks to this decision, that I've gained a space of my own, a space that is free when I feel active and present. To relinquish it would be very painful. So she's kind of constructed a room of one's own, but it's also, you know, a whole existence where her art enters into the world without the surrounding cloud of any real identity. But it gets, like, the bonus aura of, who is this mystery woman who, like, if you want to interview her, you've got to make all kinds of perfect cases through her publisher. And then the emails to her go back and forth through the publisher. So there's no, like, no one's like, okay, and here's Elena Ferrante's secret email address. Everything is mediated. There's just a real. She's in a walled garden of her own creation, which is canny for, I think, political, like publishing political reasons and publicity reasons, but really, really smart for her own sanity.

[Geoff O'Neill]

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 sitting at this. I land here. I actually don't care. I don't either. I really find myself, I guess if there was a big reveal, like Frida McFadden style tomorrow, or 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, but I would not be. I'm not going to be, like, rushing to my keyboard and, you know, 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. I 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 my 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?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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. Ok, 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 the Ferrante's fans, like, the most die hard of the Ferrante Feverites don't like that this was done. And I think that that is really important and kind of unusual that in a lot of cases, and especially today, like, 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. I'm super interested in when the writer we know is Elena Ferrante eventually dies. 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, the real Elena Ferrante today.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Well, I mean, I think when we were talking to Namalis Rapel about Toni Morrison and I don't remember if it was in that actual episode that made it in. Or in our conversation with her afterwards, she was saying Morrison didn't want a memoir because of, I think, similar kinds of dynamics. To be honest with you, not 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, in 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. We don't think we know how it matters, but it does matter. But 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 recommend it. 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 and you can go back to it over and over again. So I think that's very interesting to

[Rebecca Schinsky]

think about with an added layer of fun for that here that the writer chose the pseudonym Elena, and the main character of this book, who is a writer, is also named Elena.

[Geoff O'Neill]

That's just good fun. That's just good sport. On Ferrante's.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

How many Master's Theses have been written about that already?

[Geoff O'Neill]

Yeah. You mentioned your first exposure before, and this is it.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

This is it.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Anything else you want to say about why this is it, or before we get into the actual reading of it?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I'm so jealous of the people who read this in the moment that it was fresh. Like, I texted a friend whose taste I really know and trust, and I was like, do you have a take on Ferrante? And her response was, I have no take. I only have a feeling. And that feeling is love. And love was in, like, all caps. And I can totally see from this reading experience how that happened. For people when you just were, like, early in the hype and the book was being passed from hand to hand with, like, that real power of word of mouth. And I. 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 this context. But I am 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. I wish that I could have participated.

[Geoff O'Neill]

I think. If you read it in 2013, do you think you would have been a convert? Do you think you would've carried the banner?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Oh, that's a good question. I don't think so. I think I would've liked it, but maybe not loved it, which is where I landed. Like, 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 tastes. I don't find childhood to be that interesting.

[Geoff O'Neill]

This is a great take. It's a wonderful take, and I don't

[Rebecca Schinsky]

have any nostalgia for that. Like, the 10 to 16 years that we're. That those ages that we're seeing these girls in. And I just. 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. I'm not. If I write a novel, it's not gonna be about the glories of girlhood and young friendship. Like, you're gonna find me in the mid-30s where female friendship gets really magical. It just. Just wasn't for me.

[Geoff O'Neill]

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, Gene, than you do, though. Sometimes we do this together, but especially when it's something like this. I couldn't help it, though. Not my struggle, which I've never gotten to, which is, you know, a subject for a different day. I don't know why.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's a much bigger commitment to make.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Yeah, it is. 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.

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It.

[Geoff O'Neill]

The. The twin of that is then if you really like this and see the hype, that part is a little. Mistifying is not the right word. I think I get it. Like, I think my head gets it, but my gut doesn't. Right. I. I don't follow the people off to storm the castle for this. It's like, ah, I see. I see why people are mad. Like, yeah, overthrowing the government seems like a good idea. But you know what? I'm. I'm good. I think I'll be a fine. If we just hang it here.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I think that really articulates how I experienced it, that intellectually, I get it. I did not feel a lot of things about this book.

[Geoff O'Neill]

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, are there some reasons for that?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

You just guess. Nobody ever knows what the next big thing is gonna be.

[Geoff O'Neill]

But even if given, even giving a smaller sample size, 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. Like, I get it, but I don't have the same kind of dynamics here. And maybe, you know, 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. 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? What 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 in Italian or Neapolitan, as they're talking in dialect sometimes, or English or German or whatever, there's these. 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 and 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. 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. I think that's the thing, Rebecca. I think that's the white, the spinning molten core of this phenomenon.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. Like, to borrow from Gatsby, Leela and Linux are simultaneously enchanted and repelled by each other. There's this magnetism that especially Elena feels coming from. 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. Like 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. Like there's this super enmeshed, passionate, like codependent quality to the friendship that does ring incredibly true. I remember feeling this way about a friend when I was that age. And like the fear that that relationship is going to fade because you're coming of age. Like 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 that she's like hyper tuned into. My friend is going this way and I might be going this other way and what's gonna happen? I don't wanna lose her. Cause this friendship feels like so deep and so essential in some way. But Elen, she's so compelled by it. She says like that Leila knew how to be autonomous, whereas I needed her. 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? And what's going to happen to this friendship if it turns out that maybe we're not the same?

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

And.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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 gonna stay connected to each other. But that tension of, like, 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. Leela's really rebellious and bold, and Elena is pretty, like, do it by the book schoolgirl.

[Geoff O'Neill]

She's more disciplined. I mean, I think that's one thing that eventually, that Lino 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. And 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. But as a reader coming to it, Rebecca, I think one thing we can see for sure is, is this is hostile to their selfhood. Like, this environment is hostile for 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, 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. 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 kind of codependency, that existential, like. It's a question of survival, I think, in a very real way.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

In this particular film, 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 Laina 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.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Casual violence. Very casual violence, yes.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Like 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, Leila 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 those things? That that difference is really key to it.

[Geoff O'Neill]

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. 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, or a woman's professional life at this time and place. Whereas Lila ends in this big wedding ceremony, which is a kind of capitulation. And 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 gonna 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. And it seems like they've come back and forth over time maybe a little bit. But this is not the end of the story. So it does have a propulsive quality. Like, this is. 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. And then a lot of 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, you know, we get some assaults and just like the things that are going through. But like the characters themselves, we do not get a sense of like 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 it change over time? How did you find the actual paragraph by paragraph reading experience, Rebecca?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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?

[Geoff O'Neill]

Oh, it's impossible. The secondary. We'll get this. Office hours. But wow.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, there are like four pages of cast of characters at the start of the book, which maybe just. 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, like the fellas are just, you know, supporting characters at best, kind of NPCs really in this book, 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, 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 or something.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Even the villains are kind of interchangeable, weirdly. Like, I sometimes, like, who did what to whom? Like, I know something bad happened, but which one was it?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I would find myself being like, I don't really care about this. But then once Elena and Lila 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, those moments I felt really invested in. I really admired the language. Like, there are some just. 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, like, 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 Lela goes missing. I. I would like to experience Ferrante writing about adult womanhood.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Yeah, I. I would like to get them to. Eventually there. I. And it's not really a hot take, but I kind of feel like I get what's it about. You know, I think this is the. 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 in class, too. 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 speed. 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 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I thought Ferrante really very masterfully captured that. 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.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Secret mvp. I'll save it for the office hours.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, 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. 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 Leila, because Leela is reinvesting in the community that they have come from and planning. Like, 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. 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?

[Geoff O'Neill]

Yeah. And, you know, 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? That 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. And Elena's like. And the whole community's mystified.

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The.

[Geoff O'Neill]

What do you mean? They're not gonna take umbrage and, like, cut them in 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, it 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. Who were she. Maybe she becomes a novelist in the book for all that I know this 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?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Right, yeah, yeah. Who among us indeed. Just 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 Leila 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 Leila and her husband, Leila gave off an energy that couldn't be ignored. He seemed a faded little man. And I feel like this is it. I've been alive long enough, 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?

[Geoff O'Neill]

Because you don't even know what that thing is. Like, it's, it's, it's. You don't even. It's not like there's even a goal. They 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 like 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 better. But one thing I remember is this thing called the Lacanian mirror stage, this theory of, like, when you're little, like kids, like six to 18 months. Now, 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 stage 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. You'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 Lacan. 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. But 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 while 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 as some. As a useful way in.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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 date 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 Leila negotiate this a whole lot like, is she shrinking herself too much for what she's gonna get out of the deal? 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 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.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Really, really good, important stuff there.

[Geoff O'Neill]

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 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. Like 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah.

[Geoff O'Neill]

It's true. It may not be true. It's not a magic. It's sleight of narrative hand to get us to our sympathy is there. And so towards our vision, of course.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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 Leila. But for Leila 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 fraasade of like, oh, that's fun. I see what you did here, Elena Ferrante.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Yeah. One more thing before we get into stray thoughts territory. I might hold the specificities of these in bands 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 resists a simple reason 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. Like, I 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 their interpretive moment where they get to that thing. Except to say that it exists.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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.

[Geoff O'Neill]

If it was in the middle, we would definitely be spending some time.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Time.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Do a little soul searching, if you would. Anyway, sorry, no puns.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Soul search. It is worth mentioning that the subtitle of the largest chunk of the book is the Story of the Shoes.

[Geoff O'Neill]

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. That was my stray thought about this.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I was really wondering if there's an alternate universe where this book comes out contemporaneously with BookTok being big and that we get a totally different booktok. What if My Brilliant Friend had been the defining first book Talk hit instead of the Colleen Hoover books?

[Geoff O'Neill]

Well, even something like we who have Never Known Men might be a little bit closer tonally and, like, sort of style. I haven't read that book, but. But, like, it's. It's more interested in this level of discourse, I think, than the Colleen whose sort of situation.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Oh, is it I we have never known I who have never known Men?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I think it's I who have never known men.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Okay, I didn't do my Googling. That's off to stop the dome here. Where else do you want to go? You've got a bunch. I've got a bunch. We can go in whatever.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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 that she

[Geoff O'Neill]

feels she's trying to pull out. I agree with you. I almost feel like that's a misreading. Well, I don't wanna 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, no, I agree. It's very complex.

[Geoff O'Neill]

This is not those. This is not a simple, straightforward friendship story. It's something much more than that.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, I want a word for this type of friend or this type of friendship. Like, Elena describes Leela 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.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I don't know, but I. I need some. Some succinct way to capture that dynamic.

[Geoff O'Neill]

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 cornucopia 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. That, as in good and evil, would bind my fate in hers. I was blind, she 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 the stern, 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 em dashes, perhaps I hoped that no form could ever contain Lila and that sooner or later she would break everything. Again, it's not friendship. I mean, it is and it's not. So I agree with you completely. What's being groped for here is some way to articulate this feeling. And that's cool. Like, I have no more. That's as fun as I can have. Trying to do a close reading or pay attention to it is.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's really cool. And it opens itself up for so much interpretation and digging. And like, as many popular just raves of these books have been read, there's a ton of scholarship on them for books that are only 12 or 14 years old, which is really interesting. My last big stray thought was like, 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.

[Geoff O'Neill]

I was thinking about higher stakes weddings because the end wedding here does feel like a really tough hanging. Like There's a bit of larceny in the hearts of all the attendees. So I'm thinking, like, the wedding and the Godfather, the Red Wedding and then the ending of Ferrante's wedding. Those are my top three.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Oh, it most reminded me of the Fishes episode of the Bear.

[Geoff O'Neill]

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. Like, they're not really specific. They're just. They're ready to cut someone's head off because their chicken Kiev came out late or something. I don't really understand.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Like, 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 of, like, did that actually happen? Or 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?

[Geoff O'Neill]

As the ultimate negotiator of the extant, 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, like, again, as 20th century. Sorry, 21st century Americans. Pardon me. Good Lord. You have to acknowledge, but you won't understand, like, the moving between formal Italian and Neapolitan, 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 doesn't.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Does.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Is meaningful, but a little beyond my ken to offer a real signpost for what it might mean there. I shudder to look at. I didn't look at the number one Goodreads quote. Rebecca, what is it?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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.

[Geoff O'Neill]

That's a real strange one to do. I don't remember. I don't even remember this sentence. I don't remember this sentence.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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. And I couldn't pick one out.

[Geoff O'Neill]

I think that you're on. 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, you know, I. She was the thing that got me through the dark Naples nights. Like, 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?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Let's see. Elena describing Leela'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 Leela. Or at least you get to be adjacent to rule breaking. 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

[Geoff O'Neill]

little side quest for a repair here.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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 Leila, if you got to the end, arrived at the sea, I felt. Felt joyfully open to the unknown.

[Geoff O'Neill]

The one, I was gonna guess the most single moving line to me that felt maybe the most on the nose, is something that Leela says to Lena, which towards the end, where I think they're gonna go tell Marcelo, which is the scarier of the couple of suitors, that actually she's not married, Lila's not, Leela's not marrying her, and she says, elena, you have to come with me. And then Leila 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 right there. 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? I mean, isn't that what we always

[Rebecca Schinsky]

want at some level, yeah. 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.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Other, 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? Could 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And of course you can't. It's not possible to be understood by. By everyone. And that's what makes a friendship like this so addictive that, that like somebody gets me, somebody sees it and really understands and like that does, like 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, like, I can only imagine what that feels like. My oldest friend now, like my oldest friendship with another woman is like 20 years in. And how profound that feel to be like we were kids who knew no things when we became friends with each other. And we have gone through relationships and marriages and divorces and like parents, illnesses and all, like all that stuff of the world and morphed in so many different ways, but that there's. 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, that she does is incredible. And. 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

[Geoff O'Neill]

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. I 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 this.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I think that part of what made this book so resonant for women was a Ferrante. The feeling that Ferrante gets it, that she must have felt this thing that I've felt. And so maybe that's a little wish casting on my part. Is a like, surely she must know this experience. But this. More. I usually fall closer to where you are. Like people can. People can do research and they can imagine things. But there's something about this that that, like for me resists that it feels lived to me.

[Geoff O'Neill]

I agree. And 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 and 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 in 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. 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 fi, which in German means the empire of two. And that seems like maybe that's close to. It's a romantic relationship. But this, this. This is our own little world, right? Where we make the rules and we adjudicate and we're not subject to other people. Of 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's good stuff.

[Geoff O'Neill]

It's good stuff. Let's see, here's another Ferrante doing Ferrante things of trying to articulate the inarticulatable. 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. I know Hamlet saying there's special providence in the fall of a sparrow is one thing. Saying, like, all the wrongness of the world is in your sort of, like, non verbal gestures. I don't know what to do with that. Rebecca, do you have any take on that particular one?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

What is she trying to tell us? Well, I marked this in my notes as well, and when I was prepping for the show, I looked at it, like five times, and 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 of. 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.

[Geoff O'Neill]

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. And 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Absolutely.

[Geoff O'Neill]

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

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, that's a great way of putting it.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Go ahead.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, save questions. 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 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?

[Geoff O'Neill]

Yeah, what more do you want? Speaking of Vonnegut, he says every now and again, if you say, if this isn't fine, what it is is. Yep, two KV shouts today. That must be a sign of something unexpected.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Vonnegut. Coming up in a fright moment.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Is this for you, Rebecca? Why might this be for you?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I mean, I think if you want all the ingredients of a beach read with the smarts and flair of a literary novel.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Can I press you? Why, why is even a beach read thing here? I, I guess I don't get that. Why is this a beach read? Even orthogonally?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I mean, all the like.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Because it's in Italy.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's in Italy. The girlhood stuff, like women's friendships are the subject of a lot of beach reads. There is the discovery of sex, the negotiation of complex friendship. This guy or that other guy. What are we gonna do with our parents expectations? Like, it's, and maybe some of this too, is just the expectation I came in with. Like, this is pitched as a literary beach read. But I could picture myself, myself, like, 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.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Yeah, I, I, I'm not, I'm not saying you're wrong. I just, that's not, I get. Some people do say that, and 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 beach read.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I don't think. Yeah, I do think the Italy of it all happened has a big impact. It's meaningful that we can picture them in Naples where the light is good and they're near the park and they're

[Geoff O'Neill]

eating pizza and ice cream.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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.

[Geoff O'Neill]

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 of like background characters in a George Seurat painting. Like, you can sort of make them out, but, boy, you really got to squint and maybe they don't matter.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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 Lila.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Well, we'll maybe take. We'll just talk about the character characterization strategy and what might be going on there a little bit. And then I think if you want or need characters to be good and. Or bad, likable and. Or hateable, like both even been. We.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

No one is just one thing.

[Geoff O'Neill]

We're not Joe March. I mean, little women get shouted a lot of times, but we don't get a Joe March. We. 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. 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. So if that's going to bother you, maybe not. I think we're ready for the immortal cool 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?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

What is the good life? How do I know what I know? And is this all there is? Really big ones, but those. The first two are really intertwined with each other, that Elena and Leila 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 knows her perception? And what does Leela know? What do other people feel like? What's real about this world?

[Geoff O'Neill]

Yeah, I don't remember. I don't know the order of these things that 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, try 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. I think I will initiate it here, or at least entered into the record as a possibility. Who I am I. And who are my people? That is nested within that is also how did we get here? Who are we? Where 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 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 gonna. What do you think about adding that?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Oh yeah, I approve. Bang the gavel.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Are we sure this isn't about art and writing?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

That's a hilarious question. These girls love books together. They write things together. One of them is a wr. As you said, little women gets name checked multiple times. But like so does the Iliad, so does the Odyssey. So do a bunch of the classics. Like 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.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Yeah. Could you get most of the gist from watching the Signal adaptation which I have not seen? Rebecca. But there is one.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, there's. HBO adapted it for a series that debuted in 2018. 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 gotta 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.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Like I do too. Like I said, the special sauce to me are those passages where she's trying to describe what Leila means to. To her. And you could get a voiceover that does that. But like you've got the book right there. But maybe that's me. Movie, musical, TV series or Muppets.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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 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 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. Like I would have done this as a movie if I. You know, given the keys, I should

[Geoff O'Neill]

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 a room on a clef here, which is a series. 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 if there's a couple of these that, if they're true, I think would shake some people pretty, pretty bad. Not that they're like, you know, bad people necessarily, but I think. I think the edifice of Ferrante and my brilliant friend the gin guitar might fall a little bit if one of those two particular blocks were load bearing for you.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, the books resulted in just tons of Ferrante themed tourism in Naples. Really interesting stuff. There were, like, Ferrante pizzas in different restaurants being made at one point in, like, 2014, 2015, 2016, which is super interesting, especially given how gritty the Naples of the books is. Like, this is not a glamour story.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Lila is manifestly dirty for, like, the first two thirds of the book.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

She's just rolling around, 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 gonna take her work. 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?

[Geoff O'Neill]

Oh, man. Hot takes. You've got the one that I'm scared

[Rebecca Schinsky]

of, because the world's most reasonable man is not going to like this one. 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, like, I just don't think there's any amount of research that could get you there. And I'm willing to. 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, so.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Well, that's a different.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

That's the thing that would make me mad is the lying about the sources of your experience. If it just turned out that a mother 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, but it just. Just. I just don't buy it.

[Geoff O'Neill]

You know, I had a couple notes related to that. I think I'm just gonna 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. I just wonder. I think it's absolutely not the phenomenon that it is without the pen name thing now.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Totally agree.

[Geoff O'Neill]

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. Like, that's. 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, I 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 Lady Ferrante.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

The thing we need the German word for your friend is weirdly compelling and makes you feel some kind of way.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Yeah. Further reading an awesome. An interesting one. A lot of ways to go out of Ferrante, but no obvious ones for me.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

No obvious ones. This one was challenging for me, but I will start with the Ferrante letters by Sarah Chaya, Merv Emry, Katherine Hill and Jill Richards. Shouts to friend of the pod, Laura McGrath, who was on the Interpreter of Maladies episode for turning me onto this. These four women are scholars, great readers and their 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. 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. 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, 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.

[Geoff O'Neill]

No, that's a, that's a, that's the one that everyone reaches for, but it's

[Rebecca Schinsky]

like it's the wrong word.

[Geoff O'Neill]

It's a misdirection. You're, you're, you're, you're getting the complication but not the substance.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah.

[Geoff O'Neill]

In that particular.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

What do you think about Sally Rooney as a comp? I saw this all over the Internet.

[Geoff O'Neill]

No, not really. I mean it's not bad. I guess it's like literary fiction, people having relationships with each other. I, I guess I've only read the most recent one, which I can't even remember the name. 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. A more recent book, Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu, which is about a couple of friends over several decades and they're artists and it's different but I felt the vibe. I would not be surprised to me if Stephanie Wambugo 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, troubled, wholesome 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 middle Midwestern college and one of his students, Tom Outland is a, is a. Is a remarkable person. Like he journeys out. He's vibrant, just something he's got. He's got the. He'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. I just. It's not girl dynamics but this idea of like trying to make. Try seeing someone that you think there's something there too 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 Catherine novels that people care about. If you you have top four Willa Cather novels feelings, I will read your zero to well read email with extreme prejudice. I am here for that for sure.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Please give Jeff the gift of your top Willa Cather novels.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Anything else in the further reading? I don't remember if there's anything else.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, 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 Ernauld. Also another a big book.

[Geoff O'Neill]

The Group, which I have not read any or no that's interesting.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

The group by Mary McCarthy and then a Girl is a Body of Water by Jennifer Nanseibougou Mokumbi. 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.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Yeah. 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 till like their copy is falling apart. 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 but. And their 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 the place. Rebecca, what do you think about that? I mean anything else you want to

[Rebecca Schinsky]

totally agree and I think at A lot of points. The relationship between Elena and Leela feels more like what it feels like to be a sister than just a straight friendship that they are. There's kind of no question that they're gonna 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.

[Geoff O'Neill]

I was thinking Gatsby may at the same time in Sim professor helps. Where there's, you know, Caraway is looking at Gatsby. But also these fraught romantic relationships and really this focusing of charismatic and enigmatic character. But I think there's something in the scene setting. It feels like the eternal summer of Italy. And where they are and these places, I think makes sense.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

That's a really good one.

[Geoff O'Neill]

I had secret history as well for these complicated friendships, relationships. How are we bouncing off each other? We're trying to grow up at the same time. We have 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. I like that segment. Let's do that some more now that we've got 40 or 50.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Added that to my notes.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Cocktail party crib sheet. Rebecca. Three to five takeaways, I think. Is it only me that has six?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's only you this time.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Yeah. In all bold caps. Never underestimate books for about young women.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yep.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Just don't do it.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Don't do it.

[Geoff O'Neill]

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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Okay.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Like an epic. Like to do something Ferrante. Seems like this is not about Odysseus and tall ships or the Fall of Troy or whatever, or Count of Monica Christo, but their relationships over decades is a kind of saga. And I would be Interested if there's others, multiple.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

If you put them all together, you've got like 1200 pages. You have something to.

[Geoff O'Neill]

You've got Warren piece. Yeah, 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. Outside of, like, what you think. 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 are zero to well read score. Each one gets a score from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest historical importance, readability, current relevance of central questions, a book nerd read credit and ob dam 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. Are 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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

[Geoff O'Neill]

to make that maybe in 2016, when it was real hot, maybe.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I don't really see it around. I mean, it was just declared the best book of the century so far.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Well, but.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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. Not the biggest book.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Literature that matters. That matters.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Because I was thinking about that times thing. Like, 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 what. Where the ranking. 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? 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.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Importance.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I'm gonna put it three.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Oh, three. I'm saying number one of the century. So far. It's a. It's a low ceiling, high floor is what I was thinking. I don't think it can be an 8, 9, or 10. And it's. And it hasn't had a bunch of. At least to my knowledge. And maybe my lonely crowds comp. That is actually underproof my point. But my sense is there hasn't been a lot of Ferrante's Ferrante, and there's nothing a lot of. You know, it's not like speculative fiction that became literary fiction or it's like one of these macro trends. So. I don't know. I was gonna say six or seven, but I'm willing to go with whatever you think.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Let's give it a five. Let's put her in the middle.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Okay. Readability, no plot. Hard to keep the character straight in translation.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Interesting sentence structure at points. 4.

[Geoff O'Neill]

It's not long. Oh, it's higher than 4. It's not hard to get through. Like you're gonna get through it. I guess I'm thinking in terms of the page turniness for this.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Oh, page turniness.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Yeah.

[Geoff O'Neill]

It's still 10 million copies. It has to be seven.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Let's give it a seven.

[Geoff O'Neill]

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. It is unresolved.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

At least it's either 0 or 10.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Yeah, I think that's right.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Like what to make of friendship and life in the world as a woman. Woman, girlhood. Like that's around. 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. Five.

[Geoff O'Neill]

I don't know. Five, six. Let's do six. I don't like five. I Don't know why.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

All right.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Book nerd read cred. Well, another interesting one. I think it's the one we're doing this a lot. We 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. I don't know. Boy, this is maybe another six.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

That feels right to me.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Yeah.

[Geoff O'Neill]

So the O 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.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, nine is where I was going to go. There are some passages that are stunning.

[Geoff O'Neill]

I found myself very stimulated, provoked, leaning in, furrowing my brow, thinking about it when I'm not reading. Reading the book under 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. Very weird. I feel less certain about this, which is already a very fraud game to play with these books.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I would bet we get more emails about my brilliant friend than about many of the past titles.

[Geoff O'Neill]

People have read it. I mean, it's number eight on the list. Like people people remember. I think it's interesting that New York Times reader list has much more recency bias because, like, wasn't Demon Copperhead, was it number one?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It was number one.

[Geoff O'Neill]

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 02 well read for our guided read alongs, the first of which will be Sailing the Wine Dark Sea with Odysseus. And 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 0 to well read podcast. Choose email, especially for a mailbag, but for any old reason, especially if you have top four rankings of Willa Kevin's book Zero to well Read at book riot.com thanks to Thriftbooks for sponsoring this season of Zero to well Read. Zero to well Read is proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. Rebecca, you did it. You read, my brilliant friend.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Happy to be here.

[Geoff O'Neill]

Congratulations to you. Thanks.