Virgin Suicides by Jefferey Eugenides

I’m not very far into this book yet but I think that I’m starting to grasp what the book is mainly going to be about. Since it starts out describing the tragic death of one of the Lisbon family daughters I am guessing that the story is going to follow this family and their troubles. What I really find interesting and perplexing at the same time, is that the summary of the book clues in that the main character of the book is a neighbor boy and his friends who watch the Lisbon family and their personal troubles- but I believe that what this coming of age novel is going to really show us is not how these boys were each effected by the deaths but how each girl that died grew up and was forced into such a situation.

If you think about it death is one of the most obvious and startling ways that can change someone or help them to grow. In their life you see a person: a walking, breathing, being with a heartbeat and a brain... but it’s only till that person is taken away from the world that we truly begin to see them as part of life. Many people around the world often wonder why so many humans become famous only after their death... we’ll have you ever heard the saying,

"You don’t know what you've got till it’s gone"? We look and we see the impact they had on the earth, we see the stain that their life left on everything, because we can’t see the indent of someone’s footsteps until they have already moved forward. What a death can do to someone is that it can shock them in such a way that strangely they begin to come to peace with their own life, they begin to see the atomity of their problems and just how much a life means.

It’s rather sad to think that to learn the exact value of a life you must lose one, from the moment we gain such a spectacular thing shouldn’t we then know what a gift this is? But on a positive side to things, a death can truly give you that last leap you need into growing up... into really beginning to realize who you are.

What this book for the mean time reminds me of is a quote from another book I read over the summer, this book also dealt with a sad story of a suicide but from a more personal view. What the main quote that stuck out to me was,

“Unless you learn to wrap your brain around the fact that you are eventually going to die, you'll never wrap your arms around the fact that you are currently living.” to me this really shows what death and coming of age meet where everything that could ever explain what it means to grow up comes together. It’s much harder to know that right now you have blood coursing through your body being pumped from your beating heart, then to know that one day that might just stop.

Also on another topic I’m not sure but I’m beginning to suspect that these sisters who all committed suicide, had a suicide pact? I wonder if in a book like that they will ever explain that.