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How Does 'My Brilliant Friend' End?

Finished Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels series but still reeling from that finale. Did Lila and Lenù's friendship survive everything?
2025-06-26 17:06:35
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8 Answers

Best Answer
Elmer Franco
Elmer Franco
*SPOILER ALERT* The last book by the Italian author of the “My Brilliant Friend” quartet will depict the moment of disappearance of Lila, the great rival and friend of Elena since childhood. The theme of friends with a shared and complex history is that which in the meantime had also inspired the story “The Lie of My Childhood Friend”. The protagonist comes back to his hometown and discovers that his best friend as a child has built a completely different life on the basis of a lie he had told many years before. The story follows the consequences of that single lie, layer by layer, in a tight and highly personal drama.
2026-07-21
Thomas
Thomas
This book ended in a very profound way for me. Lila’s death was written in such a simple yet powerful way. The rest of the book was spent trying to find her, and in the end she was found and then left behind by Elena who was torn between anger and adoration. The way that Lila’s son resembles Stefano instead of Nino is another element that has really sunk into my psyche as the years go by. Also, the change in the neighborhood over the years, but the same cycles of violence and gossip kept occurring.

I’ll never forget the last image of Elena at her desk, now writing to try to and find herself after being mirrored by the friendship she had with Lila. In the end Ferrante leaves a multitude of questions unanswered, and we are left with the mess of life, threads of storyline left dangling. We can only wonder if Lila had orchestrated her departure with the ultimate gift for Elena in mind, that of independence and the ability to stand alone.
2025-06-27
Damien
Damien
The ending was a huge surprise for me. After all these years of following the complicated friendship of Elena and Lila through the decades, their ultimate goodbye was a huge shock for me, especially because it was Lila’s disappearance. Of course, some readers will not be happy with the fact that Lila leaves behind a son that she loves so much and abandons him, but this is the ultimate rebellion of a woman who for so many years fought against being contained and defined by the strict neighborhood she grew up in and by the men in her life, and also defined by the way Elena wrote about her.

The rest of Elena’s novel will no doubt explore Lila’s disappearance, but it will be written by her. What interests me more is how Elena will react to Lila’s disappearance. It’s not going to collapse her world, obviously. Instead she’ll re-make Lila in her writing. We read the final pages of Elena’s Typewritten novel and they are a churning attempt to capture the essence of her friendship with Lila before it is lost. The thematic interest here is of course that women’s lives are constantly rewritten by others, but what is brilliant and unsaid in this final section is whether Elena thinks she has written Lila back to life or not. Each memory that Elena has shared with us will linger in the reader’s mind and we shall never know whether she got it right or not.
2025-06-28
Quincy
Quincy
I finished reading My Brilliant Friend by Katie Stoltz and it was a great read. It left me with some satisfaction at the end of the book but also with a lot of unanswered questions. The main character, Lila, is gone at the end of the book and all Elena is left with is a pair of shoes and Rino, Lila’s son. Throughout the book Elena tries to learn more about Lila and their friendship. In the end of the book it is shown that most of their friendship was based on rivalry and unsaid tensions between the two. The end of the book is raw and real and I think it is great how it shows us that life doesn’t end in a neat little package. It seemed to fit Lila’s character perfectly because she is always slipping through the fingers of society but she has a huge impact on the people around her. I also thought it was really great how Elena continues to write in order to try to understand Lila and their relationship better.
2025-07-02
Fikri Mahmud
Fikri Mahmud
I need a bit more time to ponder this, as it has left me with many more questions than I have answers. I shall need to sit with this for a while longer, possibly re-reading the last few chapters in order to possibly understand it better. Is anyone else feeling that they possibly have missed a crucial point the first time around?
2026-07-31

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