Date: 2023-09-10 Pages: 256 I had 3-4 books to read before this one, but I kept getting stuck on all of them. Add in travel, and I didn't finish any books for a few weeks. Once I got home, I decided I just needed to switch books and get lost in one — Jeffrey Eugenides was a good place to start. So, I picked up The Virgin Suicides, without any idea what the book was about, other than the fact a person I respect (very much) referred to it as written by "a Greek guy" where "everything written by him is great" Earlier this year, I lost a good friend of mine to suicide. I hadn't really had to deal with death before that (I'm not sure how to phrase that—"deal" seems imprecise— but before, death was contained to relatives across oceans and accidents and teen suicides from other schools, friends of friends, which doesn't negate their importance, but does change the way I feel as a result of them). While I was reading, this series of personal events kept playing in the back of my mind. I read about characters that projected puritanism, which disguised a separate entity of darkness consuming them. I read about characters whose behaviour seemed inexplicable but logical in their own way. I read the rumours that corpses seem to always feed. This book contains a lot more: the interplay of virginity and of stigma, the rituals that both precede and follow death, the way we intertwine desirability and worthiness with sex. Yet at the same time, I think we — or maybe just I — have a tendency to see all books as containing some kind of profound, relational, personal commentary where the author wrote the book for us rather than to offer some kind of universal story or message. Both are certainly valuable to be clear: I just don't want to narcissistically assume one is more present. So I'll leave my commentary there, and just contend that who we are — more precisely, what we've experienced — will change the experience of this book greatly.