The Friendship Challenge

It sounded unbearable, and as I read the novel I felt a mounting sense of dismay. “I really don’t want that in a friend!” I declared in my e-mail on the subject. What I wanted, I explained, was warmth and support. But I began to wonder if the fact that I hadn’t had relationships like the one Ferrante described meant that something was off about me, that maybe I had missed an important developmental stage. For what struck me most about the Ferrante novel was how those feelings of intense, self-lacerating jealousy coexisted with deep love; the girls love and uphold each other, like boxers resting in a moment of clinch. I wondered if this was a closeness I’d never known because some weird timidity had prevented me from acknowledging my own competitive instincts at the crucial stage described by Ferrante.