Friendship and reading take time, but I tend to be pushy with both. I'm a voracious, perhaps violent reader of novels, and a voracious (hopefully not violent) cultivator of new friendships; I blaze through books in single sittings and similarly crave those day-into-night, coffee-into-beer conversations where you learn everything about a person in one heady rush. This isn't necessarily a good thing. Both of these impulses are surely born out of a brutish impatience to reach some certain knowledge of what will happen, to get to the end. It's hard to force myself to slow down and relish the meandering pleasures of getting to know a person or a novel.

I devoured these books the first time, the way I remember devouring books as a kid, the way Lila does, according to Lend. It was that old feeling, the excitement of having a mind to which another mind is speaking from the page. Rereading them has been remarkably slow—and not just because Sarah encouraged it. Part of me is trying and failing to memorize the sentences, which build rapidly and by association—comma, clause, comma, clause—like the inveterately booming, inveterately corrupt city of Naples. The next part is trying to decipher what has happened here, how this book was made, why I have forced it on every woman I care about with little more than a lame jacket copy summary. Italy. Friendship. Their whole lives. No wonder so many of those women looked at me with blank hopefulness, wishing I would say something intelligent, give them a good reason, or even just a few more words.

"Just trust me," I have to tell them, inadequately. "You'll love it." And the fact is, everyone does.

Why?

Mostly, I think, because it is a book about deciphering that which is present and has always been around us: life, these people, our parents and neighbors, the world into which we are born, our maddening friends. It's all there already, our material, we just have to put it in order. So, in going back to the beginning, for the slow, searching reread, I can't help but think about the arrangement of this material—the order in which Lend, who is writing it, presents it to us—which seems to be the order in which it presents itself to her.

a portrait limned by the convergences of language and the divergences of class

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. [...]