Yet while The Great Gatsby or A Separate Peace or On the Road—these bro-love tales of masculine exceptionalism—suggest to us that bright-burning human fireworks like this might actually exist somewhere, Ferrante's brilliant friend[s] show[s] us the opposite. Rather, I wonder if Ferrante's point is to highlight the fact that all friendships—especially real, deep, true ones—are, on some level, built on fantastic projections. We don't get to know the real Lila (Lina to everyone else in the neighborhood) and can't ever, really. For as long as Lend is our narrator, we'll be blinded by the too-bright blaze of her particular and singular understanding of Lila as her enigmatic and brilliant friend, her opposite, her better half. It's a weird depiction of friendship that offers a frightening revelation: that to some extent, perhaps all our friends are imaginary ones. But even if our friends are somehow unreal to us, it doesn't mean that friendship, and friend-love, aren't real or true. And even if this sounds shifty and makes me seem like something of a sociopath, I don't honestly think it's a bad thing. It's also kind of a beautiful thing—it's what lets us see our close companions through the bifocals of friendship (critical on top, rose-colored on bottom), to describe them in that particular nonerotic language of love that Jill evoked. It's the imaginary, malleable quality of our friends that allows us to shape them into desirable and aspirational definites, visions of personhood clearer than our own uncomfortable partial views of our misshapen, amorphous selves. Thus, a large part of Lila's magnetic draw is in the specificity of her depiction. [...]