This thesis aims to build on the recent interest in Italian women's writing, with a focus on the work of Elena Ferrante. It will seek to explore the ambivalence at the heart of the depiction of female friendship in My Brilliant Friend (2012), Ann Goldstein’s translation of Elena Ferrante’s L’amica geniale (2011). In this text, we find a focus on a friendship between two women and a narrative form whereby the life story of one friend is narrated by and through the other. Drawing on Adriana Cavarero’s notion of the ‘narratable self’, this thesis seeks to examine the extent to which the conflicted nature of the female friendships depicted, i.e., the dichotomous nature of narratable notions of identity, whereby subjectivity is achieved through, yet also threatened by the other, is conveyed in translation.