They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked higher than the...

We knew the pain of winter rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball....

O Earth, lie heavily upon her eyes;Seal her sweet eyes weary of watching Earth;Lie close around her; leave no room for mirthWith its harsh laughter, nor for sound of sighs.She hath no questions, she hath...

On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and...

For the first time ever we sympathized with the President because we saw how wildly our sphere of influence was misrepresented by those in no position to know what was going on.

They didn’t exchange a single word. But in the weeks that followed, Trip spent his days wandering the halls, hoping for Lux to appear, the most naked person with clothes on he had ever seen....

We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together.

We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in…

College feminists made fun of skyscrapers, saying they were phallic symbols. They said the same thing about space rockets, even though, if you stopped to think about it, rockets were shaped the way they were...

Historical fact: People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They...

During a warm winter rain … the basins of her collarbones collected water.

Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words.I don’t believe in “sadness”, “joy”, or “regret”.Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that is oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my...

in Detroit, in July of 1967, what happened was no less than a guerrilla uprising.The Second American Revolution.

A love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims–these are lucky eventualites but they aren’t love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal...

As they were walking, a beggar came up, holding his hand out and crying, “Baksheesh! Baksheesh!”Mike kept on going but Mitchell stopped. Digging into his pocket, he pulled out twenty paise and placed it in...

He knew a lot about his grandparents – and perhaps he feels he’s been endowed with abilities to go into people’s heads who are long dead – but, to a certain extent, he’s making it...

Virgin suicideWhat was that she cried?No use in stayin’On this holocaust rideShe gave me her cherryShe’s my virgin suicide

We Greeks are a moody people. Suicide makes sense to us. Putting up Christmas lights after your own daughter does it—that makes no sense. What my yia yia could never understand about America was why...

Mr. Lisbon knew his parental and neighborly duty entailed putting the retainer in a Ziploc bag, calling the Kriegers, and telling them their expensive orthodontal device was in safe keeping. Acts like theses — simple,...

[…] and the love he felt at that moment, truer than all subsequent loves because it never had to survive.

Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.

She lost much of her appetite. At night, an invisible hand kept shaking her awake every few hours. Grief was physiological, a disturbance of the blood. Sometimes a whole minute would pass in nameless dread...

It wasn’t conscious, but I guess that one book is the reaction to the other. The first is so imprisoned in a male point-of-view, and the second is a point-of-view that can go anywhere it...

The essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back to where you begin.

When we asked him to sum up his impression of the girls’ emotional state at that point, he said, “Buffeted but not broken.

They thought depression was like bieng ‘depressed’. They thought it was like being in a bad mood, only worse. Therefore, they tried to get him to snap out of it.

Even our parents seemed to agree more and more with the television version of things, listening to the reporters’ inanities as though they could tell us the truth about our own lives.

In the end, it wasn’t death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life.

Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.

The book has many different characteristics: some are extremely old-fashioned storytelling traits, but there are also a fair number of postmodern traits, and the self-consciousness is one.

My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood.

But this is all chasing after the wind. The essence of the suicides consisted not of sadness or mystery but simple selfishness. The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They...

Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It’s always there, though.

According to an ancient Chinese legend, one day in the year 240 B.C., Princess Si Ling-chi was sitting under a mulberry tree when a silkworm cocoon fell into her teacup. When she tried to remove...

It was amazing how it worked: the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies.

Discussing it later, many of us felt we suffered a mental dislocation at that moment, which only grew worse through the course of the remaining deaths. The prevailing symptom of this state was an inability...

When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what they had seen or found or what had been told...

Fin da piccole sapevano quanto poco valore il mondo attribuisse ai libri, e non perdevano tempo a leggerli. Mentre io, anche adesso, continuo a credere che quei puntini neri su fondo bianco abbiano il più...

It’s often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, “Stay there. Don’t move.

I don’t want to ruin your life,” Leonard said in a gentler tone.”You’re not ruining it.””The drugs just slow the process down. But the end’s inevitable. The question is, how to turn this thing off?”...

This was a characteroloical prelude, but it wasn’t chemical or somatic. It was the anatomy of melancholy, not the anatomy of his brain.

Yes, you need a passport to prove to the world that you exist. The people at passport control, they cannot look at you and see you are a person. No! They have to look at...

College wasn’t like the real world. In the real world people dropped names based on their renown. In college, people dropped names based on their obscurity.

Listening to Leonard, Madeleine felt impoverished by her happy childhood. She never wondered why she acted the way she did, or what effect her parents had had on her personality. Being fortunate had dulled her...

At that moment Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn’t know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with, and he reached out in order to meet her for...

What my yia yia could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time.

Household objects lost meaning. A bedside clock became a hunk of molded plastic, telling something called time, in a world marking its passage for some reason.

It was always embarrassing when professors assigned their own books. Even Madeleine, who found all the reading hard going, could tell that Zipperstein’s contribution to the field was reformulative and second-tier.

There was nowhere I could go that wouldn’t be you.

For our own part, we learned a great deal about the techniques of love, and because we didn’t know the words to denote what we saw, we had to make up our own. That was...