HBO's *My Brilliant Friend* Premieres This Weekend. Its Author Is Still a Mystery

"Whenever director Costanzo speaks of Ferrante, the author of the original novel, his dark eyes look upward, as if searching for her in the cracks of the ceiling, or in some parallel plane above the hotel attic."

HBO's new series My Brilliant Friend premieres on November 18. It is adapted from the novel of the same name by the Italian writer Elena Ferrante — the first book in the Neapolitan Novels, the quartet that became a hit around the world.

Calling it highly anticipated would hardly be an overstatement. When the first two episodes screened at the Venice Film Festival in September, the audience stood and applauded for ten minutes. Variety judged that it had solved the two hardest problems in adapting the book: staying faithful to it, and putting the protagonist's inner life — the source material's most striking feature — on screen. "It retains some of the literary qualities of the book and transfers the rest to the screen in a moving, unforgettable way."

The novels' success is, of course, the main reason the show has drawn such attention. By the Wall Street Journal's count, the Neapolitan Novels have sold 10.2 million copies worldwide, more than a third of them in English. Ferrante's readers have whipped up "Ferrante Fever," and in 2017 a documentary took the phenomenon as its subject, with Michelle Obama and the Pulitzer-winning novelist Elizabeth Strout among those on screen. Hillary Clinton says in it: "You read the first one, and you cannot stop reading and thinking."

The narrator, Elena (Lenù), is a writer, and her story runs through the unsettled Italy of the postwar years. She grows up in a chaotic, filthy Naples neighborhood, and stays close for decades to Lila, the friend she makes there and the book's other lead. After Lila vanishes without warning at 66, Elena sets down in the first person everything the two of them lived through, and their tangled bond with the city: reading together as girls, falling in love with the same man as women, then raising children side by side. It is a story about friendship between women, and what makes it unusual is how complicated the feeling is, and how deep Elena's attachment to it — and her fear of it — runs. She believes the drive and the pain of her later life both rest on the pressure, the pleasure, and the hatred Lila gave her.

Teasing that tangle apart, and doing it in the first person, gives readers an "immersive" experience. The New York Times once picked out an example: when Elena remembers the past, she seems to have no interest in "clarifying anything." She leaves the memory deliberately blurred, reaching again and again for words that commit to nothing — "perhaps," "who knows." That makes her, inside the story and for the reader alike, an uneasy woman, "easily invaded," a woman who, like many women, "has the desire to express herself but cannot truly do so." In the novels she is pulled about by contradiction and control, and it is that quality that has pulled so many readers in.

The Neapolitan Novels introduced readers to Elena Ferrante — an author who, like her protagonist, is called Elena. But the name is only a pen name; her identity, her real name, even her gender remain unknown. Since publishing her first novel in 1992, Ferrante has attended no book launch and given no interview in person, answering questions only in writing. The anonymity seems to have become part of "Ferrante Fever" itself. In 2016 the investigative reporter Claudio Gatti wrote in the New York Review of Books that Ferrante was, he believed, a literary translator whose real name was Anita Raja. Many of her fans condemned him for it. The BBC commented at the time: "Ferrante's anonymity gives her fans an indefinable thrill — it grants them the precious space to imagine her."

Now that Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend has reached the screen, how did she and the director talk to each other?

The answer holds no surprise: through formal emails and the publisher's WhatsApp. The discussion and the instructions were dense, yet Ferrante still addressed him as lei, the polite "you," rather than the everyday tu — "as if it were the 19th century," the series' director, Saverio Costanzo, told the Guardian. "I wouldn't dare say Elena Ferrante and I are friends. I'm only her working partner... She or he, I don't know either."

Costanzo, now 43, first approached Ferrante in 2007, hoping to film her 2006 novella The Lost Daughter. Nothing came of it. Over the decade that followed he grew into one of Italy's most promising young directors. Several of his films turn on sensitive women who commit baffling acts of destruction, and on knotted interior drama — Hungry Hearts, which competed at Venice in 2014, follows a mother who sets out to protect her child from harm and ends up slowly starving him to death.

Perhaps because he sees and works in a similar way, he took an unexpected phone call in 2016: Ferrante had chosen him to direct the television version of My Brilliant Friend. His first reaction was that it "felt daunting", because turning a bestseller of that size into a series is no easy job. He had seen how far "Ferrante Fever" went, and he had already directed The Solitude of Prime Numbers, another bestseller adaptation, for which the book's fans handed him picky reviews. He took the job anyway. "She was reaching her hand out to me then, saying: 'I've decided [to make this story with you] — why can't you?'" he said as he recalled the decision for the New York Times, one hand gripping the reporter across from him, the other reaching into the empty air, as if Ferrante were standing in it.

Ferrante duly became the ghost in his life. She never appeared, and she was exacting about every detail of the adaptation. "Even when she's writing to you by email, what she's after is completely clear," Costanzo told the Guardian. "So if you feel yourself weakening, she won't soften one bit. She just... commands and demands." And: "It really is a bit like working with a ghost. A kind of nightmare. I'm telling you, it's frightening, because at night you start to dream — of things with no face, no body at all."

Even so, Costanzo has never stopped believing that Ferrante's notes work, and that the books are rich enough to deserve that close attention and respect. The New York Times reporter described him this way: "When he speaks of Ferrante, the deference in his tone is something you rarely see from a director speaking about the original author of his screenplay." Nightmares and all, he told the Guardian that he does not care what sort of person Ferrante is — or rather, that he does not need to know her to understand her work. What she writes, he thinks, is true, and it fits the characters and the plot of a drama so neatly that "once you move them to the screen, they open like flowers, with hardly any effort." He can feel the emotions and the mental weather in the books: they are about two girls, but they hold rage, revenge and love. "This story belongs to everyone... I can see myself in the shadows of Elena and Lila."

Ferrante has watched the series, he says, and pronounced herself "very satisfied" — he repeated the phrase to the Guardian reporter several times, relief and disbelief mixed in his voice. "Whenever director Costanzo speaks of Ferrante, the author of the original novel, his dark eyes look upward, as if searching for her in the cracks of the ceiling, or in some parallel plane above the hotel attic."

My Brilliant Friend runs to eight episodes and is HBO's first original series not in English — besides Italian, it uses the Naples dialect of the 1950s. It was shot in Caserta, a 45-minute drive from central Naples, on a lot of more than two hectares, one of the largest in Europe. The site was once a glass factory, abandoned since the 1980s; over the past year it was rebuilt as a neighborhood, with 14 households, a church and a tunnel reconstructed, and the furniture, doors and windows all from the postwar years the story takes place in.

The shoot took eight months, and more than 9,000 people auditioned. In the first two episodes Elena and Lila are children; later they grow up. The children are played by Elisa Del Genio, 11, and Ludovica Nasti, 12; the teenagers by Margherita Mazzucco, 16, and Gaia Girace, 15. Almost none of the four had acted before.

Del Genio, the young Elena, comes from Naples and is half Italian, half Norwegian. She turned up to keep her brother company at his audition; he was not cast, and she was. Nasti, the young Lila, is the livelier of the two. She told the Guardian that her favorite scenes are throwing stones at the boys, and the one where she argues with her father and he throws her out of the window. She is a child model, likes playing football, and on set everyone calls her "the boss."

The Guardian describes the teenage Lila as more delicate, soft-spoken and slightly mysterious. "I fell in love with my character the moment I shot my first scene... I love how quick she is, how she reads people. But she isn't easy to play, because she's very complicated and her thinking turns without warning. Only by playing her could I understand her. She gives off a feeling of enormous strength — you may read the novel and think she's a devil, but in fact there is a hidden fragility in her." That shaped how she reads Lila and Elena's bond: "The tie between them is like a riddle; it makes each of them more complete. Unlike Lila, Elena looks fragile but is hard inside. There is always distance between them, and they keep closing it, again and again."

Earlier this year a Brazilian tourist went to Ischia, the island off Naples, looking for the places in the novels — perhaps the summer Elena spent there reading and swimming. One evening at dinner she walked straight into the My Brilliant Friend crew mid-shoot: "Elena," "Lila" and the novel's "Sarratore family" were eating in front of her. Costanzo found the scene funny, because the tourist told them that plenty of people fly up from South America to hunt for the places Ferrante describes. Ferrante-trail tours, large and small, have in fact sprung up in Naples, each promising to show visitors the real city.

The real city is exactly what Costanzo set out to show. "We don't hide any part of Naples. We're not making postcards." Violence and organized crime run through every stage of the two girls' lives, and the Naples of the 1950s and 1960s on screen can fairly be called broken down and airless. But those scenes are not the point for Costanzo, or for Ferrante. What interests them is how the girls grow inside that place, and what they do in answer to it.

As Elena and Lila put it in the novel: "Without love, not only the lives of people become dreary, but the life of a city as well."

Cover image from HBO.