My Brilliant Friend

emotion to have but it's so normal and it's healthy to experience that emotion but it's what you do with that emotion and how you learn to navigate and understand that emotion is really what distinguishes you as like a good friend and a good a good person

yeah absolutely it's like This is actually so, it's made me think about, so I'm reading, I just finished reading My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, which is part of this Neapolitan quartet.

life-changing if you are a woman if you're anyone read this read these books because I the commentary on female friendship is crazy but it really does zero in on the same feeling of jealousy is not necessarily negative because jealousy can also fuel you and I think jealousy and love go hand in hand like You wouldn't be so jealous if you didn't care about this person so much.

And letting your jealousy fuel you into striving for better as well.

And I think My Brilliant Friend plays with that where like she talks a lot about like if I didn't have my friend, I wouldn't have the motivation to be going after the things that I want because she goes after the things she wants.

And yeah, I think jealousy is really, really natural and it shows that you care.

It shows that you're invested.

Mm.

You know, my brilliant friend shenanigans or, or, or, or hot takes aside.

Yep.

But like Jemisin, three consecutive Hugos, four books in a giant series.

I mean, life is short and there's no list of books that you have to read, so I kinda feel like if a book has put you off for some reason, it's fine to just stay off of it unless or until you run into a compelling reason to try it.

Like, I don't think that we really need to spend our one wild and precious life talking ourselves into reading things.

Um, if you hear a conversation about "My Brilliant Friend," I don't know, an episode in this very podcast that makes it seem like, oh, it is beyond that, or maybe that's a place where, like, you can challenge it if you know you're just stuck on something like the cover.

So go read a couple reviews-

The weather is not good today.

My pitch for Kin would be My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante meets The House of Eve by Seneca Johnson.

Like My Brilliant Friend, Kin centers A deeply intimate female friendship, and like House of Eve, it explores the dichotomy between upper and lower class Black society in 1950s America.

Kin follows best friends Vernice and Annie, who grow up together in a poor town in the rural southern United States.

As children, they are inseparable, but as they near adulthood, their lives begin to diverge significantly.

with such a big cast of characters and so many things going on.

And one of the reasons that I think this latest attempt has been more successful than my previous attempts is because I'm actually channeling a writer whose style I love and admire very much, and that writer is Elena Ferrante.

If you've read My Brilliant Friend or any of the sequels, then you know that she is also working with this big, complex story involving a large cast of characters taking place over a long period of time.

Yeah.

One book that comes to mind that, granted, it's been a little while since I've read it, but My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante.

That follows childhood friends.

Is that how you say her name? No, it is.

It's almost like I'm really obsessed with Elena

Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, which I have not read, criminally so, but it's on my list.

I'm going to read it this year.

Well, what I love about that series is kind of what we talked about, these two girls from a young age all the way through adulthood, and they're surrounded by this world of patriarchy in this very small town in southern Italy.

So then I looked, I did some noodling around on the internet and realized that it really isn't, a standalone novel, you should really read the novels that come before it.

So I bought My Brilliant Friend on my Kindle.

And I am reading My Brilliant Friend.

And I'm really enjoying it.

It's very, very good.

So I assume that I will read the other three novels in the Tetralogy series.

It just doesn't seem right.

But anyway, I'm really enjoying My Brilliant Friend and Elena Ferrante.

No, we don't.

We have Persuasion by Jane Austen, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, Chanel, Prada, and Dior, which are just little coffee table books.

And then we have my book, I hope Eden reads this, on a little book stand, and she'll kinda be anchored here for now.

So this is kind of the vibe.

I haven't talked about this book on the podcast at all, so I'm going to have to start with a quick recap.

So when I was reading Kin, I was reminded so much of My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante.

In My Brilliant Friend, we have these two best friends, Elena and Leela.

They grew up together in this small, impoverished town in and they both want to get the heck out of there.

Similarly, in Kin, we have these two girls, Vernice and Annie.

This is a really rich and nuanced culture-filled novel about identity, memory, and legacy, and there's this, my favorite part of it is just these deep, nuanced discussions between the characters about imperialism, politics, philosophy, and most importantly, art.

It reminds me of My Brilliant Friend in this way, where, um, there's just the characters discussing these ideas and disagreeing.

Um, and it's published by the same publisher, so I feel like there's a connection there.

Good stuff.