A place for her in me
By Lilith Stuart
April 26, 2026
Graphic by Nikki Ngyuen
In the blistering Texas summer, where the concept of girlhood ran as a rampant social media trend, depicting itself in bright and long sundresses in a collage of charcuterie boards, bows, and everything pink— I found myself picking up Elena Ferrante’s “My Brilliant Friend”.
I had asked for the novel the previous Christmas because it appeared on the New York Times list of The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. It sat comfortably in the number-one spot, with two other works by Ferrante included in the list. I downloaded a photo of the book, put it on my wishlist slideshow and it was under the tree on Christmas Day. The grainy cover had laid on my desk throughout the following months, collecting dust and a stray bookmark only a few pages in.
I picked it back up when the heat started to feel as though it was seeping into the walls of my home and suddenly the desire to read called out to me. As I read through chapter after chapter, one thought stood out to me: is this a good representation of female friendship?
Elena and Lila would not be, by my definition, friends.
My definition of friendship was something entirely positive. It consisted of sleepovers and movie nights, outings to the mall, telling secrets to eager ears and much more. That was not always what I personally experienced, but it was a message I was fed by my explore page on social media.
“Blessed because I had a friend who never saw me as competition.
Me and the girl I never had to ask to be a good friend.
Just girls being girls.”
And though I mostly agreed that these are thoughts that should be celebrated, the continuation of my reading started to weaken my once-solid belief.
But what was this belief based on? I preferred to remember my past friendships as nothing but breezy and sweet, but during my reading of these moments between Elena and Lila, I found them more akin to my real experiences than the sugar-coated memories in my head.
If I did not believe these two girls were friends, why was I seeing some of my own friendships in them?
Art of all kinds is meant to tie people together from across time periods through the “ultimate human connection” of similarity. I was a college student spending her summer in a small Texan town, who found herself relating more to the poetic lives of Elena and Lila in 1950s Naples, Italy. In this dreamy setting, I started to reflect on my friends of the past.
My First Friend, Amber
“Already then there was something that kept me from abandoning her. I didn’t know her that well; we had never spoken to each other, although we were constantly competing, in class and outside it. But in a confused way I felt that if I ran with the others I would leave her something of mine that she would never give back.”
Every August 25th, Amber occupies my mind. It is her birthday that used to mark the beginning of the school year.
Amber and I met at a daycare, a sour interaction even between four-year-olds. I had sat down across from her to use press markers to make a design of colorful circles for my mother. I instantly noticed her bright red hair as the sunlight cast its rays through the windows. Our eyes met, her eyebrows pinched, and she said,
“Oh, it’s you.”
Those few words sounded friendly enough, but I still remember the look on her face. It was the closest look to a scowl that a young child could make. I was a shy kid, so I didn’t say anything and just started to color. Unbeknownst to me, we had just become friends — whether it was the colorful arrangement of my stamped dots or the nonsensical chit chat we had, she had decided that she enjoyed being around me, turning the face of a stranger into one of a friend. We would end up sitting next to each other during snack time, or facing each other during naptime. While Elena and Lila were walking hand and hand down the street, avoiding the rocks being thrown at them by the rambunctious boys, Amber and I were walking through the colorful halls of our elementary school, trying to find out what being friends really meant.
We would remain friends for eight years, inviting each other to birthday parties and sleepovers, making our own inside jokes and memories. We were both seen as the “smart kids” in class, but we differed more in our interests. She was the energetic, outgoing one, playing every sport and winning every game at recess. She was not afraid to take on a fight, like Lila. I, on the other hand, was more reserved and shy, preferring to sit in the shade and write stories rather than get hit in the head with a tennis ball. Elena reminds me of myself as a kid, obedient and passive almost to a fault and relying on Amber, unless she was getting us into trouble.
At first, I did not find these differences to be detrimental. It was something I found quite funny. However, middle school brought its own separations. Nothing horrible had happened. It was not a large fight or falling out. We just stopped sitting together at lunch, passed by each other in the hall as if we were strangers and that was it. Reading Elena and Lila’s separation, after Elena goes ahead in school while Lila does not, brought forth the same pit in my stomach I felt when Amber did not even pick up her hand to wave when she saw me. Our separation was unspoken, just a feeling that we were no longer together.
We did not talk again until our junior year physics class. It was my birthday, November 1st, and she walked in and said “Happy Birthday!”, telling me how a reminder on her phone notified her about the occasion.
So as I remember her on the 25th of August, she remembers me on the 1st of November. I can see myself on that day, twenty years down the line, sensing her presence as the sun shines through the windows.
Graphic by Nikki Ngyuen
My Bold Friend, Thea
“I felt grieved at the waste, because I was compelled to go away, because she preferred the adventure of the shoes to our conversation, because she knew how to be autonomous whereas I need her, because she had things I couldn’t be a part of.”
Choosing P.E. over athletics in junior high was like social suicide, but at least the people were fun. While the athletics students were running laps in the gym and puking their guts out, Thea would hover by the school’s entrance every morning, eagerly looking for someone or something. I never bothered to ask, until I heard her describing someone in PE that sounded eerily similar to my crush the past year.
My interest was piqued. How funny would this be?
So I turned around and asked if she knew the guy’s name. She had befriended a group of the PE girls at this point, drawing people to her wherever she went. It was her open energy, something that never withheld itself even when the outside world would prefer it. The subject of her gossip did not end up being my former crush, but another older boy that always walked through those doors every morning. The busy eyes staring out the glass doors clicked at that moment — she was looking for him.
One fateful morning, I had arrived at school early. This was abnormal for me as someone whose mom had to practically pull her out of bed. Meeting Thea, I saw she had a piece of paper in her hand. On the inside she had written:
“You’re pretty cute. Here’s my number —”
We sat by the entrance and waited for him to walk up. Person after person hustled past us while we got stuck holding the doors, none of them the dreamy guy. Hope dwindled as class time approached, until at last he stepped out of a car. She quickly pushed the piece of paper into his hand, and ran off to class with all of us at her side. He never texted, but Thea and I kept in touch.
We would go through middle school together, dissecting pigs and walking through the halls when our class got out early. Thea liked many boys, and we would fantasize about school dances like we were in a rom-com. Which boys would we want to dance with? Who was staring at who? Dances must be universal because Elena and Lila attended many themselves, and it was there when Elena realized that Lila garnered more attention than her. And it was during that same time when I realized I faded more into the background of Thea’s story. Where I once felt significant within her life, as if we were bonded by our experiences together, I appeared to dwindle. Someday I felt as though Thea did not even care whether I was there. She had her new friends, her new sense of humor, and her crushes. Her friends were my friends, but I wanted her to recognize me as her best friend, someone she could rely on.
Where we once talked about boys, she would now go to people with more experience. She would wander at lunch, talking to everybody else’s tables. I became deeply envious, and I was too immature to express it directly.
It was on a FaceTime call during COVID that our friendship ended. She had gotten a boyfriend. She told me how her new friends were doing the same. I just realized that we did not relate to each other anymore, that we had become foreign to one another. She only spoke about herself, and I could not comment out of either disinterest or lack of knowledge. Once I hung up, I felt a chapter closing. I had become someone outside of her and she had done the same, and now we were no longer connected.
My Beloved Friend, Rowan
“From that moment all we did was shout together and separately: laughter and cries, cries and laughter, for the pleasure of hearing them amplified. The tension diminished, the journey began.”
I did not consider Rowan to be my best friend because she was everybody’s friend. I had never met someone who did not like Rowan, so her interactions with me seemed like those with everyone else, it was just something she did. I found myself in a D&D group with Rowan, and she was just the same there — nice to everyone, making them feel welcome.
We started to bond more, finding our common interests interweaving with one another. We both loved Camrys because that was what our families drove. And I would find myself in Rowan’s Camry named “Lucille” after every theatre rehearsal.
When Rowan got into the same college I did, we celebrated. We thought of all the things we were going to do together. This was our chance to get out of our small town and venture out into the big world. For Rowan and I, it was college. For Lila, it was a marriage to Stefano. It was money and status, the poor shoemaker’s daughter wearing nice dresses around town for a change. Elena was the student focused on her studies, watching Lila’s exciting life from afar.
While I started living my college experience the “Elena” way, I saw Rowan fully living Lila’s life of awe and splendor. She got into the theatre shows we both auditioned for, and I was happy for her. She had found a guy that she liked, and I felt happy for her there, too. Though I had a feeling that my loneliness was caused by something internal, I was glad that Rowan was living the life she wanted, the life we planned. She still kept in touch and we chatted over classic college things — exams, 8 AMs and when to go home.
It was late in the spring semester where Rowan and I started going out to dinner more often. Her roommate was barely ever in her dorm, so we would just sit on the fluffy rug and watch Kurtis Connor or talk about everything.
“You know, I’ve been kinda lonely here,” she said to me once.
I was shocked.
“Yeah, you know that you’re still my closest friend. Right?”
I didn’t know.
Rowan was loved in my eyes, and I could not imagine her being lonely. I felt like Elena when Lila called her “My brilliant friend” (a slight plot twist in the novel, but I digress). It was as if my perception of her was unexpectedly reflected upon myself.
In that same dorm, and on that same rug, we laid out plastic shopping bags and opened a bottle of pink hair dye. I covered my hands in more plastic bags, trying to tie them together to make gloves, and Rowan and I attempted to dye her hair pink. That moment, full of love and laughter, marked my best memory of my freshman year of college, even though it made Rowan’s mom mad.
Now, when I look at Rowan, either working at her desk or sitting across from me at lunch, I see one of my best friends. And I remind myself of how lucky I am to see myself through her eyes, and I hope she feels the same.
My Brilliant Friends
Elena and Lila’s story is about a singular friendship, but in my reading, I have seen all of the friends I have ever loved. I see their joy, happiness, envy, frustration and love. Though we would all like a strict definition and guidebook to friendship, there is not one. I cannot include every single friend and every single lesson learned because then I would be here for an eternity, and I would miss all the great times to come, whether we are hanging out and enjoying our company or communicating effectively after a fight. Seeing girlhood displayed on social media is only one side of the story, the ideal side. Through “My Brilliant Friend”, I saw that being a friend is not just enjoying “girl’s nights” when everything is perfect and well crafted to fit on the Instagram grid. It is in those smaller moments and words, that no one else sees or hears, and those times where anger seems to rise, and the recovery after makes the friendship worthwhile. Perfect or imperfect, I hope that every friend I have had knows that I carry a piece of them in me. I could not be who I am without them, and I will take the good and bad just to call them my friends. ■
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