The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante

or, exactly like eggs

or, Save My Heart but Break My Legs

When I was seventeen, my best friend was this kid named Eric. He was smart and handsome and charismatic. Most importantly, he was wild. He seemed to have nearly no impulse control and so he would sometimes just do the most bonkers thing you could think of.

I loved that.

Just now, I managed to find the Christian Surf Rap band we invented on Myspace. Sadly, you can’t hear the music, which is probably for the best. It’s the kind of inside joke so inside itself and the very specific context of 2005 at our high school that it would make almost exclusively me laugh. Though one friend used to leave me voicemails of these songs at 2am for years.

We had many hilarious times just driving around and being idiots. We used to get the adults who worked at the McDonald’s with our other friend to buy us alcohol and then we’d spend all night being tiny maniacs, listening to the worst emo music and having heart to hearts so stupid that it bound us closer than brothers.

We became inseparable. Nearly every day, I’d hang out with Eric.

Eric was, to put it mildly, not doing well. He got mono at the beginning of our Junior year and just never went back to school. He had a 4.0 GPA and dropped out seemingly for no reason. I didn’t bother to question this much back then, but it’s obvious that he had crippling anxiety at best and something quite a bit more serious at worst. I mean, I knew he was not doing well, but I thought I was helping.

I wonder, now, if I only did more damage.

We were bound to one another by our depressions, by our hopeless romanticism, the way we fell in love so hard and so deep and so fast that we spent many drunken nights crying over some newly discovered way to break our own hearts.

I needed Eric and he needed me. We loved each other. We were there for each other always, whether it was 3am or 2pm. We’d drop what we were doing and go be a friend to the person in our life who most needed a friend, which was us.

We needed love so much but all we had was each other, cheap booze, and a willingness to open our hearts to anyone willing to listen.

We spent months talking about art, dreaming of who we wanted to be. We wrote poetry of our brokenness and shared it with one another. He wrote music and dreamt only of forming a band again, of getting back on stage. I only wanted to make my dreams into language, to make words that the world would dance to, would fall in love to. We watched movies of loss and longing and cried while getting drunk on Boone’s Farm even when it was only noon.

We didn’t eat. We only got drunk. We didn’t know how to take care of ourselves. No one else did either. And though we tried, we really were not equipped to save one another, even though that’s what all this was for. Why we kept running, kept drinking, kept up all nighting, kept screaming and crying and dying always to be loved, to be seen, to be heard, to be held and have the person on the other end really mean it.

Love me, we begged. But it was only ever the two of us.

We fell in love, at different times, with the same girls. We’d call them at 4am while drunk out of our minds and sometimes they’d even talk to us until the sun came up. We spent nights getting wasted at swingsets at parks with girls we wanted to love us the way we so desperately needed. Girls we believed we loved so hard that we were ready to die if they asked us just the right way.

an aside about breakfast

In many ways, I learned to cook from watching my dad throw things together. He grew up poor as poor gets. His dad died when he was eight and his mother never remarried, nor did she learn to drive a car. She also happened to be a terrible cook. And so my dad and his brothers all learned to cook for themselves early in life. Incidentally, they all became great cooks.

But my dad, in many ways, never grew out of his childhood privations. He loved making a big plate of scrambled eggs for all of us for breakfast. The eggs were the only constant ingredient, however.

His process of making eggs was to grab whatever was available in the refrigerator or pantry and just tossing it in. Bacon, ham, salami, cheese, liver, onions, peppers, mushrooms, spinach, tomato, potato—everything was fair game.

And though I was an exceptionally picky eater as a child, I generally gobbled up his kitchen-sink scramble.

One day while watching some infomercial—infomercials provided my dad endless pleasure and laughter—about making omelettes, he decided that that was the real shit. That’s what we needed to do now. Every time he made an omelette, he’d remind us of that infomercial selling some kind of appliance to help you make omelettes that he never bought.

The trick to an omelette is simplicity. Eggs, a tablespoon or two of water per eggs, and a whisk. Then, toss whatever you want inside right before you fold it.

My dad knew this but also didn’t seem to care. He continued to kitchen-sink his eggs with the exception that he now folded them. Maybe threw a few slices of cheese in there right before the fold.

or, the perfect omelette

Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels follow two friends who seem to both love and despise one another. Two girls in the Naples slums who meet as children and remain bound to one another for the next sixty years.

Their world’s defined by violence and poverty, by class and politics, by big dreams in grimy rooms where the only escape is money or education, and both of those tend to require the other.

Over the years, they share everything with one another but also hide and lie to one another. They love each other but also hate one another.

Elena and Lila. Closer than sisters. Bound to one another. We watch them grow up and fight for a future that no one else believes in, that no one wants to give them.

There’s really nothing special about this series except its flawless execution.

There’s little plot to speak of because all that matters across these sixty years is their relationship with one another. Lila, so effortlessly brilliant but so poor that she’s forced to quit her education after elementary school. Elena, not quite as brilliant but not quite as poor and so she’s able to stay in school and gradually, through her academic ability, is able to go to university, which leads her to becoming a somewhat famous writer.

Perspective is a powerful tool in this series. We see how Lila and Elena love one another, but also how they choose to hurt one another. What Elena doesn’t acknowledge but what we come to understand is how they are both jealous of one another.

Lila is jealous of Elena’s opportunities. She wishes she could have been educated. Wishes she could rise through society through the power of her ideas, her words. She wants what Elena seems to achieve so casually.

Elena wants to be Lila. Wants to be compelling and vibrant and undeniable. Lila, to her, is like a hurricane. Like gravity. Powerful and immensely impressive at everything she attempts.

Often while reading, I thought their love for one another was more than that of two friends. Had they become lovers, I wouldn’t have been shocked or even questioned the narrative movement. In some ways, it felt strange that they never became lovers.

I still think that many of the fissures in their relationship would have been resolved by their romance. In some ways, their inability to love one another romantically is what leads to every problem between them.

They are jealous of one another and constantly humiliate one another on purpose. They sabotage one another. But also they’d do anything and everything for each other.

The novels are profoundly engaging and frustrating because of this. Whenever Lila’s not involved in the narrative, however, the novels suffer. Elena is an incredibly frustrating narrator and POV. She’s cold and distant and indifferent to the pain of others.

Whereas Lila is both incredibly compassionate and ruthless.

Two girls sharing a heart splintered by the violence that defined their lives. The violence turned Elena inward, always shrinking and quietly assessing, strategizing ways to make peace, to get through this next interpersonal conflict. Lila, on the other hand, takes the violence she’s been forced to swallow and unleashes it back out into the world. She’s caustic and aggressive and cutting. She attacks viciously to ensure you don’t get her first.

As they age and have families, as the political turmoil and upheaval of Italy washes over them, sweeps them away, pulls them under, as their lives branch off in very different directions, they always return to one another.

Greatest of friends. Bitterest of enemies. They love one another deeply, but their love is poisoned by the jealousy they hold for one another.

If there’s one thing Ferrante truly does that sets her apart it’s using unlikability as a powerful narrative tool. Her series is populated by assholes, by buffoons, by brutes, and at the center are two women who come off so badly that part of you is just happy to have never met anyone quite like either of them.

But, really, it’s the simplicity of the structure that makes this work. There is no plot point that really matters all that much. Or, there are, of course, but the plot is secondary to this relationship between Lila and Elena. All the things that happen only matter to the degree by which they modulate the friendship.

Ferrante takes a few ingredients here and tells a very complex and complicated relationship as straightforwardly as possible. The prose is often gorgeous, surprising and elastic or lyrical and quiet, but always in service to this relationship.

It’s the perfect omelette.

an aside about growing up an idiot

After many sleepless nights of too much drinking, I would almost always make my friends breakfast in the morning. Which almost always was a big plate of scrambled eggs.

Though I knew how to make an omelette and even had come to hate the way my dad made eggs, I found myself recreating his bizarre version of scrambled eggs where the only limit was whatever sat in our refrigerator.

And so after years of not even eating eggs because the look of them had, inexplicably, become revolting to me at some point, I returned to them drowning in childhood memories of eggs packed so full of meat and vegetables that the egg became more of a minor binding agent to all this other stuff.

It never even occurred to me that when other people asked for eggs they wanted, you know, eggs and not all this other shit.

It was not until my wife gently told me that she just wanted eggs with nothing in them that I finally learned how to make eggs. Over a decade after I had already learned from an infomercial how to make the perfect omelette.

or, your heart looks like a fist wrapped in blood

I was not well. I don’t know if I was ever very mentally healthy until I met my wife. And even she’s had to put up with me when I wished I could be the person she needed me to be.

But, bad as I was, Eric was far worse.

We loved each other. We needed one another. I would have done anything to make him better. I choose to believe he would have done the same for me, if he had been able.

But slowly, Eric was ruining my life. Sabotaging it, even.

I remember telling him I needed to leave to go meet up with someone who I was hopelessly in love with for the moment. We were in his car. My car was at his house. She told me to come over and I told her I was on my way.

But we were driving around and he wouldn’t take me back to my car. He wouldn’t let me leave. He knew where I wanted to go and why, but he couldn’t let me go. Aggressively, he refused to take me to my car while we drove directionlessly.

He loved her too, maybe. Or maybe he saw where all this led. Maybe he knew that all the love we shared with one another would someday be poured into other people.

That I’d leave.

It seems weird now, but that was basically the end of our friendship. We kept hanging out pretty regularly, but no longer every day. No longer were we leaning together to keep each other up.

It wasn’t getting arrested or the ways I felt he tried to humiliate me in ways that only he could because he knew the things about me I hadn’t told anyone else.

It was this seemingly insignificant moment of him begging me to stay and me begging him to let me leave.

It’s been almost seventeen years since I’ve seen Eric. My dropout buddy. My temporary other half. He was my best friend but also the worst friend I’ve ever had.

For years after, he would call me in the middle of the night. I was usually doing some new deranged up all night activity with a new person who held my heartbreak in their hands so I wouldn’t always answer. When I did, it was clear that he was drunk or high and didn’t really want to talk.

Or, he did. I think he really did. But he didn’t know how. He knew how to reach out but no longer had the language to open himself up to me and I couldn’t shatter through the shells we built around ourselves to protect our taped together hearts from one another.

He used to prank call me, knowing that his name showed up on my phone when he called at 3am or 5am. Sometimes I’d hear other voices, knowing this was some new performance for the new people in his life.

I went to Ireland and when I came back, I had a different phone number so the calls stopped. Around that time, a friend showed me Eric’s mugshot photo.

Despair. That’s what I should tell you that I felt when I saw the wreckage of his life. But instead I felt so very little.

And I think about that often. The moment I knew the love between us had died.

I still think about Eric often. Think about the way he shaped me. Think about the love we shared so effortlessly, so brokenly.

Sometimes people give me updates about his life or ask me if I’ve heard anything. I never have. I never even try to look. It’s too cruel to see the mirror of how my life may have shipwrecked had certain choices not been made.

I sit here instead and think about love and broken shells and the chasms of misunderstanding still possible between two people who share a heartbeat.