JB's Bookclub. My Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante.

The rules of bookclub are simple. We read a book once a month but it doesn't have to be the same book. You just have to read a book and then we'll come here and talk about it.

I was once Twitter-famous for about two and a half minutes for writing: "If you don't have time to read, you don't have time to write." The arrogance of that statement soon came back to haunt me. For the last decade, I have struggled to read anything longer than a tweet. Most of us have. Our hyper-accelerated, dopamine-saturated culture does not encourage whiling away long afternoons with a thick novel and endless cups of tea, no matter how pleasant that might sound.

For me—the owner of not one but two personal libraries—it was not just embarrassing but painful. I would go into bookstores and spend hundreds of dollars, adding to my ever-growing collection of unread titles, convinced that somewhere in my latest haul was the book that would bring me back. Occasionally, I would find something—a novel, a nonfiction title—that I devoured. I would think: This is it. I’ve got my swing back. But I didn’t. I put that book down, picked up my phone, and fell into the algorithmic trap again.

Then someone in my family bought a copy of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and left it lying around. I couldn’t even tell you why I picked it up. Perhaps I was just intrigued. Ferrante’s first novel in the four-book Neapolitan series is both hugely popular and critically acclaimed—a rare combo. But that alone wouldn’t have been enough to start me reading it.

The novel follows the lifelong friendship between Elena "Lenú" Greco and Raffaella "Lila" Cerullo, two girls growing up in a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples in the 1950s. Lenú is studious and observant, while Lila is wild, fiercely intelligent, and unpredictable. Their bond is deep but fraught—marked by admiration, jealousy, and an ever-present sense of competition. While Lenú pursues education as her escape from their oppressive environment, Lila remains trapped, forced into an early marriage that she hopes will provide security but instead becomes another form of confinement. Their relationship is the heart of the book, shifting between affection and cruelty, dependence and defiance, mirroring the larger struggles of class, ambition, and identity that shape their lives, and at a remove, the modern history of Italy itself.

If I had to give an excuse for myself picking this up a decade after it was first released, a confession I suppose, I might as well admit that I sometimes read other authors to steal from them—not to copy their prose, but to break it down, to understand what they’ve done on the page. If another writer has managed to achieve something with great power or impact, and I’ve somehow noticed that, I want to know how they did it. Maybe that was why I picked it up.

Or maybe it was because I had just finished listening to Nick Harkaway’s Smiley novel, Karla’s Choice, in which he picks up his father’s quill and continues John Le Carré’s long literary examination of the human condition through the lens of espionage. I liked it so much that I went back to buy a physical copy to mark up and analyze. Maybe having done that, my eye fell on Ferrante’s novel, and I thought: I’ve heard good things about this. I’ll give it a read.

My friends, she has saved me.

It wasn’t just Ferrante’s prose, though, that certainly played a role. There is a spoken-word quality to her sentences, an intimacy as if she is whispering the story directly into your mind. It doesn’t feel written—it feels lived. And then, suddenly, she drops a passage so dense with truth and inevitability that you know she must have sweated over it for days. That balance—of effortless voice and meticulous craft—is irresistible.

But more than that, it was the emotional intensity of this book. The deeper into it I read, the more I found myself talking to it, or less crazily perhaps, talking to Ferrante, reacting aloud, invested in a way I hadn’t been in years. I wasn’t just reading Lenú’s life—I was living it with her. I was muttering, “Oh no, Lenu, please,” under my breath. I was throwing my head back in disbelief when someone bought a suit they couldn’t afford. I was arguing with Lenú over her ill-advised article criticizing her religious lecturer, because I had made exactly the same kind of mistake at her age, writing and publishing an article that could have no good effect, only ill.

I suspect the thing about My Brilliant Friend that has enthralled many millions of readers is that it isn’t just a story—it’s a mirror. It reflects back pieces of yourself, choices you’ve made, versions of who you were and might have been. Even though Lenú is uniquely drawn, she is also universal. I recognized myself in her ambitions, her insecurities, her relentless comparisons to Lila. I saw my own creative life in their dynamic—how success is never just success, but always weighed against someone else’s brilliance.

What was that old Gore Vidal line? "It is not enough that I succeed. My friends must fail."

Perhaps what truly made this book different, though, from all the others that I read and even enjoyed, was that it changed me. By the time I neared the end, I no longer felt the need to pick up my phone or iPad at night. I wasn’t switching between streaming platforms, trying to find the next dopamine hit. For the first time in years, I was reading a book the way I used to—as if nothing else in the world existed, and if anything else tried to intrude on that reading, to distract me from it, I would grow resentful and somewhat unpleasant.

I probably should have live-streamed my reading of the final chapters. You would have seen me sitting alone, save for my dog, in my office, occasionally exclaiming out loud. “Well, obviously, she cannot stay with Antonio! There is no future in that, Ferrante! No! She must end up with Nino. But I cannot imagine that she will still be with Nino at the end of the fourth book—because that is not the way of life. Gah!”

Sometimes, my hands would fly into the air as I gestured like an Italian, emphasizing the importance—the undoubted unchallenged correctness—of my arguments.

Sometimes, I would just wince and close my eyes, too frightened to go on, knowing what must happen next and dreading it.

And then I would go on, of course, and be amazed that the worst did not happen. Or it did. But either way I did not see it coming.

Just like I did not see my physical or emotional response to this book coming either.

I feel like I have failed you with this because, so far, I’ve only read it once. When I used to review books for money (that was a thing that actually used to happen in the olden days) I would read a book once first just for the story, then I would read it twice to take notes, and then I would read those notes a third time to really drill down into the writer’s technique and intent.

But here, I kept slowing down because I didn’t want it to end. Now that I’ve finished, I know I’ll need to read it again—possibly three or four more times—before I truly understand it.

But I can assure you that, having finished it for the first time, I feel this book.

I feel it hard.

And I feel the need to thank Elena Ferrante for giving me back to reading.

She is my brilliant friend now.

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