My Brilliant Friend came to me a year before I started the series, through my sister. She had recommended it to me over Christmas, I grabbed it at the book store, and it sat on my shelf for a year. Fast forward to March. My girlfiend and I, looking for our next escapist TV obsession (see also: The Tiger King, Love is Blind, and Succession) during the early days of quarantine, started the series on HBO. Two young girls, growing up in a Post War Naples - enveloped in poverty, corruption, and violence - find their separate ways into their teenage years and the abyss beyond. By the time the first episode was finished, I was hooked. I polished this first book off by the time we queued up the second episode. Never had I gotten such a candid look inside the lives of two characters and understood the depths of such a complex and damaged relationship as I had with the Neapolitan Novels.