The Virgin Suicides is so sad. Writing-style-wise, it's a highly consumable read, offering what feels like a snapshot into the life of a suburban family. Slowly, and then all at once, it devolves into a story about extreme parental control and a spiraling series of abuse and isolation that culminates in the Lisbon girls feeling that their only option to escape is death. With voyeuristic narrators horrified, fascinated, and obsessed with the girls, they are a good example of the bystander effect. They watch the girls' quality of life wane, watch them grow sicker and dirtier, and don't step in until it's too late. Lux is the daughter that they focus on most, as she experiments sexually and flirts with danger out in the open, damaging her body further than the harm caused by their situation through sex with strangers and using condiments as contraceptives. Outside of Cecelia who is herself made unique from the sibling set by her death, Mary, Bonnie, Therese, and Lux are made into individuals in the minds of the narrators through their causes of death. Lux suffocating in the car, running in the closed garage puts her on the cusp of escape. Bonnie hangs herself in the remains of Cecelia's party in the family basement, Therese overdoses on sleeping pills, and Mary attempts to end her life by putting her head in the running oven. Though Mary survives initially, she is a shell who ends her life with sleeping pills a month after her sisters die. Because this story is told through the eyes of boys who barely knew them as a collective, and who definitely didn't know them as individuals, the reader is left wondering as to their motives. There are possibilities explored, the parallels of their lives ending a year after Cecelia's is mentioned, but because they never come to be viewed as more than objects of fascination by the narrators, we are left grasping for meaning at the end of the novel.