Brainmeat in a Time of High Anxiety

[caitri]

Grey days, and wishing I could remember how to write creatively. (Remember dialogue? Banter? Romance and explosions and fluff?? Sigh.) OF all things, I've been watching the second season of My Brilliant Friend on HBO and marvelling at an adaptation of woman's inhumanity to woman transformed into an actual difficult friendship. At this point I want an au where the two girls run away from their awful families and social expectations and find freedom together. And AO3 has NO FIC I can find and it's a goddamn crime.

~

I had my monthly meeting with my boss. We got our annual review scores a week or so ago, and mine were perfectly fine, and they sent me into the tumult of "but it's not a perfect high score!!!!!!!! I AM SUCH A  FAILURE!!!!!!!!!!!" and then of course the related angst of an academic generally and particularly. "I work so hard and I'm not famous and influential what's the point??????????" and of course the point is "You are gainfully employed and doing what you enjoy YOU IDIOT."

Honestly, you can't take me anywhere, you really, really can't.

Comments

[minoanmiss]

*hugs you a lot* You are brilliant and awesome.

So what's this show?

[caitri]

It's a pretty close adaptation of the Neapolitan Quartet by Elena Ferrante, with each season devoted to one of the books. The broad arc of the show is the lifelong "friendship" (and also competition, love/hate, etc.) of two women in Naples starting with their girlhood in the early 1950s and concluding in the 2000s.

The first book is about their childhood in grinding poverty, with one of the girls a bit more well-off and allowed to stay in school, while the other who is pulled out after elementary school to help work. The second one opts to get married asap (she's like fifteen) to get out of her miserable abusive family and away from a local gangster who is pursuing her. The handwriting on the wall is this is going to go poorly, and ends with her wedding in the mid-60s. In the second book/season, the slightly more middle-class girl is being crushed by high school and her family's ambitions, and is dating a guy because it's something to do, but then he gets his draft card. Meanwhile our class-climber is in a Really Nice House and her husband hits her, and everyone but her friend just overlooks it. The girls as teenagers have a really good chemistry so you can believe they actually ARE friends who genuinely love each other, whereas in the books it's a much more complicated love/hate thing that just permeates all the things they both do. And then they both fall in love with the same boy, and the married girl has a clandestine affair with him, while the other just thirsts and makes her way to college where she eventually writes a book.

The last two books aren't as good as the first two. The girl who has the affair is shamed, divorces her husband, works shitty jobs, takes up with another of their lifelong group, and they have an unconventional bromance where they live together and raise her kids but don't get married. The other girl becomes a well-known writer, gets married, has kids and gets divorced, and eventually gets with the guy she has long-thirsted for but then he cheats on her, and it all devolves into melodrama.