Hey blog!!
I can’t believe this is the last book I’m reading for this class. Time is so crazy. Anywho, this week’s read was My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. This book follows the very complex friendship between Lila and Lenù, and how their connection progresses as they grow up in a dangerous Naples neighbourhood.
The best way I can describe Lila and Lenù’s friendship is that it’s kind of like an onion. It has many layers, some more superficial than others, and messing around with these layers can be very tense and painful, even if by accident (because onions make you cry no matter what). While there is a lot of support between them, there is a lot of jealousy and tension between the two. It felt as though their friendship traversed the thin line between codependency and symbiosis, with them being good for each other sometimes and harming each other at other times. Regardless, they remain connected to one another.
I think a lot of women can see some of their old friendships within Lila and Lenù’s connection, and I fall under that category. This mix between helping and harming, looking up to and being jealous of, and how these dichotomies still create meaningful experiences throughout our lives is very real. Not every friendship is just positive. I think we learn a lot about how to handle conflict and, in a way, heartbreak, when we have big arguments and problems with our friends. At the end of the day, we just want things to work out, and we hope the trust we have in one another will help us overcome issues we might have, but sometimes the perception of one another becomes so warped due to your own struggles that the friendship can’t really survive these new differences.
Furthermore, there is the fact that Lenù kind of wants to “be” Lila. I was actually chatting to a friend the other day, and we were talking about how sometimes younger siblings want to be just like their older siblings so that their parents can treat them the way they treated the older sibling. This dynamic is so harmful psychologically because you are basically telling yourself you are not worth being who you are. You end up later in life with no idea of who you are and what you enjoy, because you were so busy trying to be someone else. I feel like with Lenù wanting to be like Lila, we see some of that. Lenù wants to be seen and reacted to like Lila is by her peers, so she decides the easiest way to do that is to be Lila. But Lenù can never be Lila, just like a younger sibling can never be the older sibling, because no matter how much you try to become like someone else, ignoring who you are will always catch up to you.
This was a long but very cool read!! I really liked how the book portrayed the not-so-pretty aspects of friendships, since they happen to everyone and yet aren’t talked about much. I can’t believe this is my last read for this class!! I’d say it was a great novel to wrap things up.
Last but oh so certainly not least, we have the final entry to my
Freud Tally!!!!!!!!!
This week, we had many complex relationships between characters, but no Freudian ones!! I can’t believe how far we’ve come. This means My Brilliant Friend is our final entry into the “Knows Freud had no credentials to do psychology” category, officially ending the Freud tally. And my “the only titles that can make Freud proud are the single word ones” theory survived the whole course!!! That is very interesting, but I don’t know what to do with this information LOL
Freud Tally!!!!!!!!!
Makes Freud proud- 2 (Combray, Agostino)
Knows Freud had no credentials to do psychology- 7 (Mad Toy, The Shrouded Woman, The Time of The Doves, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Money to Burn, The Book of Chameleons, My Brilliant Friend)
Thank you so much for reading, see you guys next week!!!